Podcast appearances and mentions of jonathan tate

Wilmington Councilwoman Shané Darby and DSA co-chair Jonathan Tate join Rob in the bunker to talk about the Nathan Field anti-protesting ordinance, the trial of an actual protester, and then some talk about how organizations are handing out endorsements.Show Notes:More on the anti-protester ordinance

We hope you're hungry today, not only for food but inspiration as well, because today's episode, which is sponsored by L3Harris, features Jonathan Tate, a DC Fire & EMS firefighter and the founder of Food on the Stove, a nonprofit organization with a simple mission: “While firefighters extinguish fires caused by food on the stove, our organization promotes safe and heart-healthy eating habits to improve the food on their stoves and, ultimately, protect their quality of life.” Tate shares the catalyst for creating the nonprofit, offers simple nutrition and health tips, and details the upcoming event “International Firefighters Weekend,” which coincides with International Firefighters Day and the NFFF Memorial Weekend. Plus, we get into all this: A Lamborghini/garbage can analogy for the food we eat; the pandemic problem that prevented firefighters from getting the food needed to cook for the entire shift – and who came to their aid; and Tate's take on firefighters paying for their own food at the station. Don't miss: The new EMS acronym Episode power quote: “I was 15 years old when my father passed, and I often tell people that Food on the Stove was started by a boy that missed his father.” Hot seat sneak peek: The piece of advice he offers new firefighters. Email bettereveryshift@firerescue1.com to share your feedback!

This episode we sit down with Jonathan Tate talking about the change that God has done in his life. Jonathan is in the winning season of his life because of his relationship with God and him learning to walk in righteousness. “We do not own the rights to any of the music played during this episode” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gig-for-god/message

Delaware DSA Co-Chair Jonathan Tate joins Rob to talk about what DE DSA has been working on this year and the place for DSA in Delaware politics. Peppered in are some live PA primary updates.Show Notes:Delaware DSA SiteDE DSA's FacebookBecome a DSA Member

The demands of firefighting go way beyond the physical element; firefighters on duty barely stop to rest for longer than a few minutes. They run several calls per hour, have their adrenaline constantly fluctuating leading to demands on the heart akin to a never ending interval training. This strenuous job's primary victim is firefighters' hearts; greater than 44%, the leading cause, of all firefighter line-of-duty deaths are from a heart attack.In 2015, Lieutenant Kevin McRae was the 100th DC firefighter to die in the line of duty after 26 years of service at the young age of 44. As Mayor Bowser called it, the "loss of a hero" impacted his family, the DCFD, and the community, but it was also triggered the foundation of a genuine passion project of love, service, and giving. The death of Lt. McRae instilled in our guest, Jonathan Tate, a second-generation firefighter himself, who also ultimately lost his father due to a heart condition, the urge of doing something to improve firefighters' lives. One of the first things Jonathan noticed when he joined the DCFD in 2012 was the lack of attention firefighters were putting into their nutrition. He started the nonprofit organization Food On The Stove, which helps firefighters live a healthier lifestyle through enhanced nutrition and exercise.In this episode, we get a closer look at Jonathan's inspired, visionary, and aspirational project, Food On The Stove. Food On The Stove not only proportions healthy food choices for firefighters but also educates them on healthier lifestyle choices. Jonathan's project added chefs and nutritionists into Fire Station houses, performs blood work, and runs prospective studies to measure the impact of healthier nutrition choices on the decrease of medication and the increase of firefighters' overall health. Tune in and delve into the details of how this inspiring story started and the benefits it has brought to the DC firefighting community so far. Some Questions I Ask:You mentioned you're a native Washingtonian, but let's start with what got you into firefighting (6:53)Could you give us a sense of a firefighter's typical shift? (14:49)Tell me about Food On The Stove. Tell me about the name and significance of that name and the goals and objectives (20:53)In This Episode, You Will Learn:Jonathan talks about his relationship with Davon McRae, Lt. McRae's son, and the creation of the Lt. Kevin McRae Memorial Gym at Engine 6 in the DCFD (9:50)About firefighters' broad spectrum of obligations when on duty (15:35)How Food On The Stove started for Jonathan (22:16)Most of us take fire stations for granted. Jonathan talks about the importance of taking care of firefighters' overall health (31:51)Resources:Food On The Stove websiteFood On The Stove InstagramFood On The Stove YouTubeFood On The Stove TwitterConnect with Jonathan:LinkedInLet's connect!WebsiteInstagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of the Side Alpha Podcast, Chief Marc Bashoor speaks with Jonathan Tate, a DC Fire & EMS firefighter and the founder of Food on the Stove, a nonprofit organization that's working to improve the health of firefighters in the DC metro area and beyond. Firefighter Tate shares how losing loved ones has been a key inspiration for focusing on firefighter health and wellness, ultimately working toward reducing the number of firefighter deaths from cardiac incidents. He also details the work of Food on the Stove, which offers a healthy meal-delivery program for firefighters.   This episode of the Side Alpha Podcast is sponsored by L3Harris Technologies. When the heat is on, you go all in, and L3Harris will be right there with you! The XL Extreme 400P radio is tailor-made to meet the most rigorous fire standards. Learn more at L3harris.com/fire.

Over the past 10 years, 44% of firefighters who died in the line of duty suffered from a cardiac event. The life expectancy of firefighters is 10-15 years lower than other public servants. Jonathan Tate was unaware of these statistics when he joined the department nine years ago, or when he began Food on the Stove (@foodonthestove) four years ago. What did he know? Jonathan knew that three heart attacks and cancer had taken his father's life just nine years into retirement. He knew that changing his own diet could prevent this fate. He then felt called to share what he learned with his crew. But who was he, a rookie, to tell his colleagues what to eat? He wasn't even eating with the station, having chosen to stick with the health-conscious diet he'd developed instead of the tasty-but-unhealthy meals the company typically ate. Further, what money did he even have to buy these steaks, broccolini, and sweet potatoes? Tate's definition of resilience doesn't call for him to have all the answers, he explained, but to lean hard on his faith. In our next conversation on resilience, he tells us how he went from happy party promoter to passionate health advocate and non-profit leader of Food on the Stove.

Often when we use the term "gut feeling" we're referring to a premonition of something bad about to happen. This episode of Out to Lunch is exactly the opposite. We're looking back at that gut feeling we had BC (Before Corona) when our health and housing issues were a little different. Staring at the beginning - you've probably heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. At the foundation of the pyramid is our need for shelter and food. Even if you're a real New Orleanian and you think about food a lot, there's a pretty good chance you don't spend too much time pondering the 40 trillion bacteria living in your gut. Dr. Dale Pfost does. Dale's company, Microbiome Therapeutics, has launched a product called BiomeBliss. It's a step up from probiotics. BiomeBliss is prebiotics. (NOTE: Since the recording of this show BiomeBliss and Microbiome Therapeutics have evolved into something new and different, though right now exactly what that is is yet to be revealed.) On the basic need for shelter, Jonathan Tate and his company, OJT, are an architecture and design company who are taking a novel approach to where you live. They're buying up irregular size lots that nobody wants in desirable New Orleans neighborhoods, and building irregular shaped homes with irregular low price tags. Peter Ricchiuti went Out to Lunch at Commander's Palace with Dale, Jonathan, and over lunch the conversation takes a whole new look at our most fundamental human needs. If you're a regular follower of Out to Lunch and familair with New Orleans, this is another in the series of conversations – of which there seem to be an increasing number – colored with a certain incredulity that such original thinking and world-leading scientific break-throughs are happening here.  You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation about health, with "Vagina Whisperer" Sara Reardon and hearing expert Dr. Lana Joseph.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: [00:00:12] Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing. Today marks the first anniversary of this podcast, something I am immensely proud of.   [00:00:36] A year ago, I didn’t know that our audience would grow as it has. In fact, a year ago I wasn’t sure we would have an audience at all.  And I certainly never imagined that I would have the opportunity to talk with so many extraordinary individuals, leaders and movers in their respective fields, all doing remarkable things.  When we started the podcast, I thought we would focus on real estate and the impact it makes.  But I’ve discovered that “real estate” is a very broad industry. I’ve found a horde of people working in fascinating niches around this one big central theme – the built environment we all occupy. [00:01:26] These people work in city planning, on affordable housing, in impact investing, on mobility issues, in fintech, as architects, on sustainable development, on community capital, on equity in communities and in many other niches, pushing the boundaries of the built environment to be better for everyone.  The range of work that is being accomplished, is quite frankly, astounding. [00:01:59] I learned how big, visionary thinkers make cities better. Like Josh MacManus in How to leave places better than you find them. He’s spent quite a lot of time rebuilding downtown Detroit.  Or Tom Murphy, past mayor of Pittsburgh, who showed incredible fortitude in shepherding Pittsburgh from abandoned to reinvented in How to transform a city. And most recently, Avra Jain, who tells us all to look past the working girl on the corner in Beyond the Vagabond. When she looked she saw the future of Biscayne Boulevard.   [00:02:45] Other guests have reminded me of the power of zoning, architecture and design starting with Liz Faletta in By right, by design. Her in depth research on the impact of zoning on housing in Los Angeles provides unexpected insight.   In Atlanta, Eric Kronberg convinced me yet again of the importance of salvaging architecture in The zoning whisperer.   Christine Mondor reinforces the idea that architects can influence the future of cities in The power of design.   And Lorenzo Perez’s creativity as a real estate developer in Phoenix caught me off guard in Real estate artist. His approach to transforming ugly desert architecture into beautiful community spaces is wildly creative. [00:03:44] Let’s not forget the housing crisis. Lots of my guests are all in looking for big solutions. John Perfitt and Jason Neville are tackling homeless housing in Los Angeles by re-introducing iconic architecture, in Hungry for disruption; Molly McCabe describes the unusual approach of the Lotus Campaign in Capital is just a tool. Jonathan Tate takes an architect’s approach by focusing on the value of odd lots and the houses you can build on them in Lead by example. Scott Choppin is tackling multi-generational workforce housing in The contrarian developer, an important niche that has gone unnoticed by other housing developers. [00:04:31] Matt Hoffman is focusing instead on how technology might solve the crisis in 7.4 million short. Rebecca Foster, in San Francisco, is busy saving existing affordable housing through financial tools on Accelerating affordable housing. Brian Gaudio has a modular housing solution in Scaling up. And Thibault Manekin (T-bo) of Seawall Development is focusing on specific communities, affordability and astounding preservation efforts in Choose your own rent. [00:05:22] Across the Pacific Ocean, Australian architect Jeremy McCleod has figured out how to deliver Sustainable, affordable and beautiful housing in a market that most people can’t afford. Fellow Australian, Kris Daff, is tackling the same problem in a different way. He’s Assembling communities and offering them a path to home ownership.   And across the Atlantic Ocean Marc Koehler is turning the architectural design process upside down by first curating communities and then designing a building around them in his Superlofts project.  It’s super fantastic!  [00:06:08] Community development and social equity have moved into the foreground this year, and I expect will even more so next.   Brian Murray is Embedded in community in Philadelphia, working on projects that provide equitable opportunity for everyone. Josh Lavrinc has spent his career squarely focused on Advancing community development, through capital raising and real estate development Emerick Paul Patterson is busy experimenting with inclusionary community tactics in New York. Listen to his love of diversity in Delicious Urban Soup. [00:06:47] In West Virginia, Brandon Dennison is experimenting as only an entrepreneur can, on how to end generational poverty in A bold experiment in coal country. John Folan, who heads a department of architecture, wants to make sure that the next generation of architects understand the meaning of equity. For John, Equity is the thread. Majora Carter has gone from Revitalization strategist to barista in her efforts to bring equity to the South Bronx, one of the poorest zip codes in the country, and where she lives. “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one,” says Majora. Sadie McKeown, in Political will and community, has seen firsthand the influence of good and steady political leadership in building better communities. [00:07:43] Justin Garrett Moore has a day job ensuring the quality of public space in New York City.  But on the weekends, he’s knee-deep in redeveloping the community he grew up in. Hear what he’s up against as a black man in Black, white and red(lining). Adam Sgrenci is showing communities how they can control their own destinies, andn educating developers on how to Co-create. Adrian Washington has been developing in Opportunity Zones before they were a thing. He decided a long time ago that Greenfields are boring. And Katie Swenson is the quintessential community architect. Home is the most important community development concept for her. [00:08:43] For insights into economic development and financial inclusion hear Kimber Lanning who is Striving for justice in Arizona or Brian Beckon explain how to raise community capital in Share the wealth. Jorge Newbery is using Fintech to keep people in their homes. He’s saved 10,000 and counting, while Ommeed Sathe sees Big Change in his role at Prudential, helping them to build a billion-dollar impact fund. Lance Chimka who leads an Economic Development Department believes their role should always be First in. Towards growth. Christina Marsh has given herself over to the remaking of Erie in Of service. In Erie. Melissa Koide is researching and advancing ideas on financial inclusion. With Fintech. And Lyneir Richardson, wants to help 1,000 urban entrepreneurs grow their business.   [00:09:55] I’ve learned about mobility in cities, and how it touches real estate and equity, from Karina Ricks, who heads a newly energized Department of Mobility, and from Gabe Klein, a mobility rock star, who convinced me that the future of mobility will be enhanced by data in Mobility is pretty pedestrian. Harriet Tregoning is taking on a leadership role with NUMO, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and explains why in The reluctant planner. And let’s not forget Donald Shoup, parking czar, who believes that parking is over-rated and under-compensated in Parking not required.  [00:10:38] Others think about investment in ways I never imagined. Janine Firpo is on a personal journey to ensure that every dollar she invests does good. Listen to her explain why in She’s all in. Laura Callanan is squarely focused on Connecting impact and creativity. And Mark Roderick, a crowdfunding attorney, explains how the Securities and Exchange commissions are opening the doors for Democratizing investment. And why its a huge step forward; [00:11:12] For innovation in the building industry listen to Jennifer Castenson, who surely has her finger on the pulse of new trends, in Living the Jetson life;   Or maybe you want to learn about blockchain? Listen to Sandy Selman explain how it might be applied to real estate in Digital twins; and if you are ready to embrace sustainability and saving our planet in the most wholistic way, Sandy Wiggins may just be the one to listen to in Let’s change our mindset. And if you think we need to get back to a former time, listen to Jim Kumon of the Incremental Development Alliance talk about The lost art of small-scale development.  He’s teaching small-scale developers how to get back there all over the country. [00:12:01] Phew. That’s a lot of podcasts.  I’ve enjoyed every interview with every person.  I’m in awe of them all.   But it’s time to take some time off to rest, enjoy the weather and just step back from the extraordinary last few months that has rearranged all of our lives.   We’ll be back refreshed in September with many more amazing people for you to listen to and me to learn from. Thank you so much for joining me.  Now go forth, invest a little in your community and make some change!

While most non-essential workers have the luxury of working-from-home, first responders, along with other emergency personnel do not as they weather the pandemic. Food on the Stove's founder, Jonathan Tate, joins us for another episode to expound upon the mission work that has taken place in the midst of COVID-19, ensuring that firefighters across the city are nourished on a job that is ever-so demanding. Tune in to learn about the outpouring support from the D.C. community to support FOTS, Tate also talks about mental health awareness, and we discuss their latest meal delivery pilot: Local Food for Local Heroes. Tune in! Powered and distributed by Simplecast. Sponsored by Giant.

While many of us are sheltering in place and social distancing, essential personnel like grocery workers, medical providers and firefighters are on the front line every day. Jonathan Tate, DC Firefighter/ EMT and Founder of Food on the Stove, and Battalion Fire Chief Tony Carroll, join us to discuss their day to day experience during the pandemic, what they need from the community and what they are doing to keep their battalions healthy and safe. DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services: https://dcfirefighters.org/  Food on the Stove: https://foodonthestove.org/

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve: [00:00:08] Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.   Eve: [00:00:14] My guest today is Jim Kumon who heads the Incremental Development Alliance, which is based in Minneapolis. The Alliance began in 2015 as a collaboration between two small-scale developers who found that people kept asking them the same question: how do I build a small building in the place I love? They joined with Jim to create an organization with the goal of resurrecting the small developer. And they built a suite of classroom-based coaching tools and scaled them across the region and the country. In the first year they did big camps in Portland, Dallas, Providence, Fayetteville, Washington, D.C. and Detroit.   Eve: [00:01:12] Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Jim Kumon on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small Change.   Eve: [00:01:42] Hello, Jim. I'm really happy to have you on my show today.   Jim: [00:01:45] It's great to be here and actually to see a little bit of Spring coming around the corner here in Minnesota, so it's actually where I'm at, so it's good to actually get out to the world and see some things. So, glad we can connect here and talk about stuff since I haven't been able to leave the house much currently.   Eve: [00:02:04] Right, we're all kind of stuck. But, you know, I've been really fascinated by your organization, the Incremental Development Alliance for a few years now and your work is pretty squarely focused on small-scale projects and small-scale developers, which I really love. So I wanted you to start by telling me a little about why the Incremental Development Alliance exists.   Jim: [00:02:29] Yeah, well, we're coming up in about five years now of our work as a nonprofit organization. We work nationally to support implementers of small-scale real estate development projects and the ability for local places to have those kind of real estate projects happening in their communities. And so we exist in large part to be able to essentially re-enable and re-share the information that we used to have as a society. All real estate development was largely small-scale development for, you know, really centuries up until really post-World War 2, for the most part, and we did some things in the skyscraper era, you know, the early nineteen hundreds, but for the most part, small-scale, small-lot development was the traditional development pattern. And so, one of the major reasons we exist is essentially trying to re-learn and re-share information that we used to know across a broad spectrum of our society. And it's now been complicated by the fact that we have had 50 or 70 years of real estate development that has largely become specialized and become highly, highly tuned to scale and largely to scale finance. The kinds of developments that we see in this country are in large part due to the financial mechanisms we have. We see the things we have because they're easy to finance. And so the traditional pattern that we've had up until that point in time in the mid century nineteen hundreds is, is actually the unusual thing now. We can build big box stores and subdivisions and office parks and industrial parks, but the idea of putting a duplex on a 50 foot wide lot is actually pretty foreign in most places. And so we're trying to help put the knowledge back together within the 2020 framework and not the 1920 framework of what you have to do to follow rules and to get things financed, to make real estate transactions happen. And so we do so.   Eve: [00:04:38] Why is it important?   Jim: [00:04:40] It's important largely because it's a lost art. People think it's, especially when we first started out, in large part people think it's almost impossible. Like, well, how can we not do this? How can we not be able to do this for so long now? Large part is a) people really hadn't tried or if they looked into it, they gave up because there were so many barriers. And secondarily, there are places that really want to see this kind of development happen, but they're missing the know-how within their human resource, their human capacity of a community that's both public, private and nonprofit sectors. And so really, our organization started as a network of doers who were comparing notes and a couple of my co-founders in particular who were essentially mentoring people on the side. And it got to the point where you couldn't have that many one-on-one phone calls and still do your job, to make major money. And so, you know, we essentially bound together to help essentially take that wisdom that's sort of hard earned from the field, in-practice wisdom, and put it into a format that can be shared more widely and both in sort of beginners terms, as well as more advanced work that we have to do, either in markets that are disinvested or in markets that are too hot, they're over-invested. And so we see the conditions across the US in one or the other. And how you get real estate products done differs greatly, obviously, depending on if you're in a hotter market or a colder market.   Eve: [00:06:16] How do you help like small-scale developers or places that want to introduce interstitial small projects into their urban fabric?   Jim: [00:06:26] When we started the training work out, we realized that the two biggest issues were: one, the process. Being a small developer was sort of unknown. You had lots of people who are involved in the development industry, people who are contractors or real estate agents or architects. People, sort of, a known kind of related industries to real estate. And so those folks who were in an industry, you know, largely had a sense of the process, but really just knew they're one stop along the way. And so, many people may have some of the skill sets to put a real estate transaction together, but didn't have a complete working set, right. And no-one knows everything about each aspect of a development project, there's too much to know. But you have to know a little bit about each part of the process and know how to find other people who can help you with the things you're weak at. And so, the ability for us to help, essentially teach people, what is the process and how does it work and particularly how does it work for small scale projects? And we define those projects, you know, 1 to 20 units of housing - they could be mixed use residential or commercial and usually under 15,000 square feet, that's sort of the max-sized project and really...   Eve: [00:07:40] I fit squarely into that group.   Jim: [00:07:42] Yeah, and we're usually more talking about buildings between, you know, 500 and 5000 square feet, you know in reality. And so, those buildings are the ones that are overlooked and kind of caught in the the seams, in the cracks and crevices of our regulatory system and our financial system, because the rules change. So one of the things that we teach people is how to line up the financial regulatory system and banking system, how to line up the land use system that actually controls what you can put where and the building codes. And so, the thing is, is for larger projects, most projects fall under the same set of rules. Like there's certain zones of a city, there's the international building code, which is basically everything over three units of housing and largely commercial buildings. And the, you know, the financial mechanism of the commercial mortgage, right. The rules are largely the same for big buildings. And what makes it hard for small projects is they straddle an intersection of all three of those elements where the rules shift, right? One in two family zones are different from three and up in zoning land. There's a completely different building code that regulates one to two family buildings from from how you build a building in its construction. And then we have a financial mechanism for residential buildings that allows for one to four unit buildings. And you have to make sure that you know how those pieces intersect, because otherwise you find out, usually at the most inopportune time, that you've got a discongruent operating requirements, right. Hey, I didn't know that when I went from a duplex to a triplex I need a sprinkler system now. And that's not the kind of thing you want to find out on accident because sprinkler systems are not cheap. And so that's kind of how we got people.   Eve: [00:09:40] I've had this sort of experience myself when I built a small, it was supposed to be a four residential unit building in downtown Pittsburgh, and I got all the approvals, everything, permits, everything, started building. And one day on-site, the building inspector said, hold on a second, you can't do four units without an elevator. Because one has to be handicapped accessible. So we had to really on the fly completely redesign a couple of the units because it's a tiny little site and we could not put an elevator in. So, it seems to me that not even the city kind of really understands how difficult they are for small buildings.   Jim: [00:10:23] Well, and the question, in large part, probably was who is the last person before you tried to build a new construction four unit building? Probably a long time. Yeah. And a lot of folks who are alumni are exactly that person that you were. Right. They're the first person broaching these subjects within their building departments and zoning departments and with their local officials and their neighbors.   Eve: [00:10:47] This could be my entire career in development that you describing.   Jim: [00:10:54] Right, you did it all the hard way, didn't you Eve, yeah?   Eve: [00:10:55] Damn, it was fun.   Jim: [00:10:57] Yeah, well, and that's a part of this shared wisdom that we're trying to...We don't have enough time with, especially in the housing sector, we've got a lot of housing to build in this country and we don't really have time for everyone to make the mistakes and to to go through the vagaries that that you went through yourself and others who are faculty members went through, right, to find all this stuff out the hard way.   Eve: [00:11:21] Small-scale development could be perfectly efficient and make developers money except for all of this. Like when you have a banker telling you, oh no one's going to live downtown and they just won't give you a loan because you happen to be the first to the loft development in a downtown, that's a problem even beyond the written regulations that we're talking about. That's now a cultural issue that you've got to also break through, right?   Jim: [00:11:47] It's much harder, actually, the part between the between the ears is a way more difficult issue, especially given that even though if we were talking about the US, while we're one country we're many subcultures. And so, the way that different parts of this country and different real estate markets in different parts of the country behave, and the way that people believe that their communities should be, is vastly different. Tinkering with your zoning code is pretty straightforward, it's mostly numbers and a couple of pictures, if you're lucky, I can sit down with someone's zoning code and help them remove things that are barriers fairly quickly. But, you know, banks, neighbors, even people in the construction industry. I was, we were, there were some small houses that one of our faculty was looking at some small houses with one of our alumni in, in Tennessee. And the local building culture in that city basically was like: two by six construction, well, we don't do that. That's gonna cost more, I mean, if we gottta take this one stud off the truck and it's a different size than what used to, that's just gonna cost way more than putting in a two by four, I mean, obviously, you know. And you're just like, what?   Eve: [00:13:04] I had a really bizarre issue in Pittsburgh, when I was building a tiny house here and, when a lot of people left and houses were abandoned, people just sort of collapsed them into the basements, so you end up with land that's pretty unbuildable. And I was talking to Jonathan Tate in New Orleans and he said, well, we just have these little trucks with pile drivers that drive around and drive piles past all of this stuff, right, which is brilliant. But not in Pittsburgh. I couldn't find a small pile driver. It would have been a very large rig that would have been deployed for a tiny little project. So, from region to region you have like these weird issues popping up.   Jim: [00:13:48] Basements, no basements, right. You don't put a basement in Louisiana, right, cause you'd be...   Eve: [00:13:53] You had to do something with the ground, so it was like...   Jim: [00:13:58] Years ago I worked in, in a city in, outside of New Orleans, it's further out, further afield in the state and so a little bit swampier land of the states. And so, there was a local joke about some infrastructure projects was, you know, "my daddy used it to fish for crawfish in your basement" which, of course, there was no basement. Which is to say you built your house in the low ground. You shouldn't wonder why it's flooded over and over and over again.And so these, these kind of, you know, climate and regional issues is what is another thing that kind of makes our approach different than most real estate training and technical assistance is that our our commitment to urbanism, our commitment to neighborhoods, and that's really where we operate, the neighborhood scale, all of our cities and towns in this country are really just increments of neighborhoods.   Jim: [00:14:54] And so what's important from our perspective is there's both small scale as well as incrementalism. Those two things go hand-in-hand, but they're really separate. And one of the things that ties them together is the idea of time and scale. And so, you can be thinking through how something, a process, works in a place for how you build a building. But you have to think through the ways that those technical elements fit together and what's, how it's really going to work when you, when you set out. So for us, thinking through a housing project for a small building, you have to really take it into its parts and you can't strip out the financial piece from the physical piece. And so, most of the real estate training that I took and other people took that are involved with our organization, they were so strictly focused on the financial pro forma. If you can make the numbers work, somebody else would figure out how to make a vertical three-dimensional building out of that spreadsheet later, right. If we could just get these rents and the costs isn't over this, it'll be fine. And it's like, no, actually, you know, what goes in that building matters. If you build the building, that, as you found out, unfortunately requires an elevator, that's not, that's not an inconsequential thought process. So our belief that the built environment and its regulatory framework has to be front and center and iterative in the process, along with the financials, along with the the most usually forgotten part, which is the humans, right? Who is the occupant of this building and how is this building achieving needs of humans? And, as I was an architecture student as an undergrad, I always kind of thought that, and in my time when I was in school, I was looking at inspirations like the rural studio. People who were actually going out there and trying to build things and think about the humans, you know, part and parcel and the economic conditions that they were a part of, in that part of the country. And so, to be able to actually look at these things and say, know what? we can't separate this idea of the financial part of this building from the people and the actual built edifice, we have to think of them together.   Jim: [00:17:23] And small scale buildings are so critical because it's not, it's a jewel-box, right. I mean, our buildings, our built environment, is largely an aggregation of many, many, many small buildings. The big building is actually the outlier, the exception in the built environment we have. And so, one of the challenges we have in this country today is that we forgot how to build neighborhoods. We know how to build complexes. We know how to build parks right, of.. the office parks and industrial parks. But the idea that fine-grained elements that differ in use and size can fit together, that's a skill we lost post-World War Two, in planning, design and construction. And so, being able to teach people how to use that part of their brain, how to use that part of the thought process, is the critical missing piece in implementation, right. We have the ideas, we have desire. We were missing the actual how to. And that's why we created the Alliance was to sort of fill in that void.   Eve: [00:18:23] Really, what I'm hearing is, and I know this to be true, that small-scale is incredibly challenging, is, you're sort of up against, you know, the same issues as a large scale development, but maybe even more because of cultural beliefs, because of the way the banks like to lend, because of zoning codes that aren't really geared towards small. So it can be a lot more challenging than something large and efficient.   Jim: [00:18:51] Yeah. And we like to say and this is one of the, one of the old analogies by one of my co-founders, John Anderson, who said that small developers operate on the economy of means, as opposed to large developments, which really are, as you say, the economy of scale and efficiency. And the economy of means is largely about relationships and time. There's a finite amount of people and resources that a small-scale developer has. And so, what is important to understand is that small-scale development isn't inherently hard, it's only hard within the context that our American society has built its habits and practices about how we finance, value and built. And so what is important and what were some of the ideas that we hang our had on about, you know, what can you do with a 30 year mortgage? That was a question that came out of the last recession, as I'm making the broad assumption here that we are already in a new recession. With the last recession,  is, was a question of what if commercial finance, as we know it doesn't come back? And so, John was one of the people who was staring, looking at this and saying, gosh, what could I do with a federally backed mortgage product? What does that allow for?   Jim: [00:20:15] And so being able to look at something very basic and very simple really shows what the power of that is. Because if you think about the millions upon millions of 30 year mortgages we have in this country today, it's a ubiquitous tool, except that there were features of that tool that were underutilized. And so really we were exploring and trying to cross-pollinate what could you do with 1 to 4 units if that was your framework? And so, one of the things that we've developed over the last three to four years and my colleague, Grayson Johnson, and co-founder, this is one of her big pieces and contributions to our work, is helping us catalog. And my background comes out of the built environment in architecture and I did housing in California in the boom years and saw all kinds of crazy things that were going on when you could build a courtyard apartment building, which has got 42 units, which is like 42 custom homes like stacked on top of each other and beside each other, all selling for, you know, six hundred thousand dollars. This is sort of the the rarified air of Southern California real estate in 2007, right? And you get down to this, you know, like, wow, this is an amazing building type that no one's done in 40 years, 50 years. And you realize, gosh, these are all these different ways we could do this. And so that idea of a building type from something very complex, like a courtyard apartment building, multifamily house to something as simple as a duplex or a triple decker as we have in the Northeast or all the various kinds of cottages you find in the south where you're trying to spread out and keep air between buildings, right, and battle humidity. All these different building types that are from a climate perspective and a local culture perspective akin to a place.   Jim: [00:22:11] And really because we're a national organization, we gathered up all these different types that largely had a start in a local place and have, you know, regional sort of preferences or regional sort of ability to, you find them often, right. And we said, look, well, how can we use these building types in many places? And so we created this idea called Step Buildings, which would be a way to help people organize through these important thresholds of finance, building code and zoning code and Step Buildings is an important idea, largely because we're having to reintroduce things that are in plain sight in many places in this country, but we don't recognize what they are. And the term STEP is also an acronym. It stands for Small-scale, Time-enhanced, Entrepreneurial and Purposeful. And really, the ability for us to understand what these buildings are, and having spent time in Pittsburgh, I love, especially in the working class neighborhoods, the just sheer variety of sizes of building, right, and attachments and additions and that incrementalism of, before we had the 30 year mortgage, we only built as much housing as we could afford, which was not very much. And if we have kids or a family or parents, you know, we made these little additions and, you know, cultivated up a structure. And so as humans, we had all kinds of ways to house ourselves. They just didn't fit into the model we started doing after World War 2, which was a single family house stamped out in great scale and volume in, sort of, cookie cutter tranches of financial thresholds, right? Like, well, this subdivision is going to be for houses that will cost between two hundred and ten and two hundred twenty five thousand dollars and we'll build a hundred of them. And then get another plot of land next door and build one hundred that are between three hundred and three hundred ten thousand dollars, right. Somehow we went from this fine-grained ability to house people at different points of their life cycle to, you have to pick up and move yourself to a new hunk of land every 10 years in order for, you know, your housing type, that need that you have, to happen. And so, we're trying to catalog all the different ways that you can mix and match buildings together and be able to explain them to people who may not realize that they live in a place that has all these things.   Eve: [00:24:44] Can you share an example of a project or a place or a developer that you helped through the alliance that you are proud of, or you think is particularly interesting?   Jim: [00:24:55] Well, there's a couple different conditions by which we end up coming to a place, Now, first of all, we don't just show up in a town and do a training class. We only go places that invite us and our sponsoring spills through their hustle and through their financial support. So we go to places that want us and want this type of work. If you don't want this type of work, it doesn't get anywhere. And we've been to a couple of places who said they really wanted this and then when we got there, they weren't really all that serious, right. They were checking a box, they were, you know, throwing something, throwing a bone to a neighborhood that's been overlooked. And they weren't really serious. There were some people on the ground there who really cared about their place. But the people who brought us, or maybe who paid the bill, not so serious. And so people ask me a different version of the question you just asked me, which is, you know, who's, what is success or what happens when someone makes it? And the challenges right now is that there's a lot of people who want to get something going, and for some of things I've already mentioned, can't, right. There are some deal-breaking issues that stop people from getting going. And so, one of the things that's important, and why we do work that's both for the individual as well as for the city, is that they need each other. right. Cities, we talk to people in government all the time like, gosh, I would love to make sure that we can legalize cottage courts and then sometimes they go off and do it. And then, like Jim, so we went changed our zoning code and tinkered with a couple of local practices for our infrastructure and, gosh, you know, cottage courts should just be no problem. And I'm like, does anyone know how to build them? And so. Like, has anybody had the idea of putting five small single-family houses together in one lot? Does anyone understand how that fits? Don't like hah, no, I guess not. Well, that could be why no one's building them.   Jim: [00:26:43] So, we're at an interesting point in time where there is now, you know, especially compared to five years ago, a much larger acceptance of a lot of great ideas that could happen and could happen in your place. And so, we're working through trying to figure out what's the path of least resistance. And so I can describe a couple of those examples of people who are are finding that first step in their place.And we have a couple of longer-term relationships with places, which I think is where our best examples come from, from alumni. We have a bunch of, up on our Web site, we have incrementaldevelopment.org, we have a bunch of little alumni stories about people and projects. So I'll just cherry-pick a few of those. But it is a project, a couple places that we're working that we have some really exciting products going on, one of which is South Bend, Indiana. And we've been working on and off there now for a little over two years, specifically on the northwestern and western parts of the city. We are brought in typically for two reasons to a place. One, because there is uncontrolled or unhealthy growth, right, which is to say the place is a little too hot, that the real estate market is too hot. People are being either displaced or threatened to be displaced. Or we have the opposite. The place maybe got the wrong end of a bulldozer for a few decades. And the question is now what? How do we piece this back together? And so, interestingly enough, the tools by which we bring to the table are the same, but the the math in many cases is the part that's really different.   Jim: [00:28:25] So in South Bend, you've been brought there by, we were originally brought there by the private sector, a gentleman who really used, he's a retired professor and really just cared about the area adjacent to where he lived. And he was kind of right a the cusp between two neighborhoods and, sort of, a typical, especially Mid-western legacy of segregation, you know, the white neighborhood and the black neighborhood, he lived kind of right on the edge of it and was like, why is it that right across the, sort of, main street here that I live next to, there are, you know, half the houses are torn down and gone. And on my side of the street, you know, largely the neighborhood's intact. And so, when you have a neighborhood that is, you know, economically in a down cycle, you know, the first thing you have to do is start the rehab project. And so he came to one of our early training classes and began to understand that, well, rehab is where I have to start.   Jim: [00:29:19] But he originally said, well, I don't really want to own and lease buildings. I just want to fix some things up and sell it off to somebody else and have them be able to gain wealth. But then he realized that the math problem of when you fix up a building, sometimes it doesn't appraise for the amount that you've now put into it, to buy it and to fix it up. And he realized he couldn't sell it and couldn't finance it. You know, he had to kind of hold it for a while and lease it and try to kind of nurse it back into financial health. And this is true of both a couple of residential products and a couple of commercial buildings that he and a few partners bought. And so, the thing that was different about him and is different about the approach that we espouse, was that, while there are a lot of really difficult physical things to overcome - most of the houses in this neighborhood were over 100 years old, many of them were beset with typical issues of neighborhoods of that age where you have a lot of lead paint or other environmental things - and so, you know, these are definite headwinds to doing even rehabilitation of buildings, you know, cheap ones. Not even getting too fancy, but just enough to make it a decent place to to live. And so, I think the story there was that he began to build friends, not only people who were doing work alongside him, but folks who might want to move to that neighborhood, who might want to rent in that neighborhood, people who want to start businesses in cheap commercial spaces that have been largely left vacant.   Jim: [00:30:42] And so, when all else fails with math and with the physical rules, relationships are the thing that bind us together, that helps us overcome when we have issues with rules. And so he's been slowly building a group of people in the neighborhood to begin to help him. He didn't want to be the hero. I don't want to buy up every lot in the neighborhood. And then I have to be responsible for everything that happens. He wanted to have many people share in that work and to support each other. And so, I think His name's Mike Keane. Mike is one of the success stories, not only of getting a couple of projects off the ground, rehabbing a few things and now he's working on, probably will be one of the first few non-subsidized, deeply-subsidized new construction buildings in the neighborhood in probably 50 years. And so, you know, but none of that work would be possible unless he'd started with picking up trash in the neighborhood and building relationships with his neighbors and buying a couple of buildings for cheap and fixing them up and finding a few people who would be in them to bring life to those buildings. That's, that's one of the places that we are starting to see that the compounding effects of many people like Mike, who are now working there, both in the private and nonprofit sectors.   Eve: [00:32:03] So just generally, how do you, how do you think we need to think about our cities and neighborhoods so that we build better places for everyone?   Jim: [00:32:12] Well, first of all, neighborhoods are living organisms. They're not static things. And that's one of the key aha moments that we have to have with government officials and particularly planning and economic development and housing department folks. They're largely in place to disperse funds and make sure people follow the rules. We like to reframe their job descriptions as: you are stewards of resources and you're responsible for creating a productive tax base because, you know, that's really what our public sector has to do for us. Our public sector has to create a ability for services we want to provide as a place and we have to have a tax base for that,  we have to have a productive economy and a local productive economy, not one that's relying on state or federal subsidies to make it's ends meet. And so, one of the ways that we need to do that is that we have to make sure that our place is constantly evolving and it's wherever it's at now, there's another place that it can go to to be either economically or socially more welcoming and more accessible. And so, the building types and the Step Building thought process is we actually have little cards we've built that essentially have a picture on the front and on the back explain, hey, this building is in the, this building code type and, is largely found in these kinds of zoning codes or have these kind of attributes. These buildings require sprinklers, these ones don't. These buildings are financeable by a 30 year mortgage or they, or they're not. And it gives people a sense also for what's possible, right. An owner-occupied duplex is like one of the most accessible building types you can put in any neighborhood. And yet, you know, most of those types you're going to find are buildings that are over 100 years old. We don't have a mechanism that is widespread in this country that takes advantage of the fact that you can build a building that has someone living into it through the wall for maybe you as the owner that's helping pay the mortgage and also allows us to have a finer-grain control over what rents are charged in a neighborhood. And, because we're not looking, you know, you, as an owner occupant probably have a day job. And, you know, you're using this as income or maybe as a long term retirement strategy, right. And so, you don't need the top-level rents over time. Now, you probably need decent rents upfront, though, because our financial system, unless you're independently wealthy and can build a duplex out of your own pocket via cash, requires certain amounts of money upfront and requires a certain amount of, of conservative cost estimating.   Eve: [00:34:57] Well, this is something that you and I need to talk about because you've been fixing on a 30 year mortgage. But while you've been building the Incremental Development Alliance, equity crowdfunding has been [indeed] gathering steam. I really believe that we're going to see different types of financing available more readily for projects like this. And I don't know if you've been thinking about that at all.   Jim: [00:35:24] Well, I think there is a fantastic role to get into a little bit of of wonkishness for folks who maybe have not, don't have any background in how a general real estate transaction works but typically, whether you're building a new building or an old one, you have two components, right? You have debts, right, if you are going to buy a building and finance it, you have the loan, you're doing it from the bank and you have what we call equity, which is essentially your skin in the game that you or someone who is investing with you provide to basically have a stake in the game. And that is sort of, you know, that the bank security, that somebody has the financial wherewithal to be supporting this project.   Jim: [00:36:09] And so I think where there is a great opportunity for crowdfunding and small dollar funding in terms of aggregation, isn't that equity piece because, you know, people typically show up and when they come to our class before they go through it and we disabuse them, this idea is that, gosh, I don't have enough money to be a developer.Well, do you have enough plywood to become a developer and build a building? Well, what do you mean? Well, you say you don't have enough money. Well, do you have enough plywood? Do you have enough screws? Do you have enough, you know, do you have all the things necessary upfront? No, you don't go out and buy a truckload of plywood just to have it on hand, right. When you need plywood, you go to a lumber yard and you buy it. That's the same way loans work. The trick is to get a loan, you need to bring money with you. And so that is the case, right? You do need to have some money, but people have money.   Jim: [00:37:07] What we lack in small development, and this is what our one day workshop, which is sort of our flagship training is focusing on, is actually teaching people A, there's a process B, this is how the process works and C, one of the biggest things that we lack to make small scale products happen is someone who knows how to put together the "if I could, would you?" proposition, largely in writing? If I had 20 percent down of whatever cost it would take to build or to buy a building, could I get a loan at this rate at this..so much. And so, what we lack is people who actually know how to put the transaction together. We can find people who have money and it may come through one deep-pocketed investor. But it also may come through 10 or 20 neighbors pitching in, you know, five hundred or fifty or five thousand dollars a piece. Now, what's tricky about that is this little thing called a loan guarantee. This is, this is a tip I can, listen to, leave with your listeners today. If this is the first time you're hearing about real estate transactions and how they work and why we don't see the things that we think you should see, one of the tricks about figuring out good ways for us to be able to use small dollar capital is this problem we have that banks want somebody on the hook if something goes wrong, just want a kind of a loan guarantee. And so somebody who has enough net worth to functionally backstop, you know, all of a sudden all your tenants not paying rent or something else going out bad financially. And so, small-dollar capital, while we might be able to amass the capital necessary, unless you are the person who has the balance sheet necessary to backstop a large loan, we need other mechanisms to be able to make that loan guarantee work.   Eve: [00:38:52] Yes, but small-dollar equity can help a developer like Mike Keen do, want a project or another. He may have the balance sheet. He just may not enough to get it going.   Jim: [00:39:01] Indeed. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, it is, it is absolutely way more accessible to normal people with normal jobs. My wife and I, we know we have two incomes. We don't either of us make a ton of money, you know, we just, you know, we have a regular, you know, two regular, you know, white collar jobs. But yet, you know, we would be, we would have enough, between some retirement savings that we have, we don't have very much debt, which is important, especially for qualifying for a 30 year mortgage out the backside is having a low amount of debt and we don't really have any but the house we own. And so, you know, that's enough to get a fourplex going, you know? So for most of these buildings you would finance for a 30 year mortgage, you don't need really that much and there are people you can find who have it if you don't. And you can just pay for that purpose as well.   Jim: [00:39:52] We're also finding if you, if you're working in a neighborhood that is maybe disinvested, though, that's one of the great places that we're working to try to get local governments, foundations and institutions, whether they're hospitals, universities or corporations who are civically minded, to be a part of that because if, and we're working on a project in Memphis that is sort of structured this way, we're essentially creating a consortium, kind of an umbrella for, as sort of a master developer who sort of say, hey, you know what, we're gonna create an ecosystem by which many small developers, of which we've trained through the Alliance, can actually have the backstop where they don't need to go get, you know, a huge loan guarantee, right, where, there's going to be capital and we're going to be able to know that when we're going to build five or 10 or 20 buildings at a small area, because there's a bunch of empty lots and they're controlled by property owners, we can use one at a time, help each other build up the value in those buildings so that they do regain their value. The first one's going to be difficult to get the right appraisal for. The second one, less difficult. The third one less. And hopefully by the fourth or fifth or sixth that are all on the same block or nearby to each other, we overcome some of those structural problems that we have in disinvested neighborhoods.   Jim: [00:41:09] And so, I think the biggest thing that we stress when we come to a place and we talk to people in both public, private and then sometimes nonprofit sectors, is that you're all gonna have to come to the table and think a little bit differently, right. We can band together as neighborhoods and as neighbors and put together enough capital to have the downpayment to buy that house on the corner that Miss Mary used to live in but, you know, she passed and the house got boarded up because people were breaking into it and now it's sitting vacant but what a great house that was. But, there's a couple of things we have to overcome and so, being able to have a have a community dialogue about how do we help a bank make a loan in a neighborhood it's supposed to be making a loan in anyways, but banks are regulated. We have to make sure that banks can check their boxes, too. Well, how do we do that? So community resources being able to bring together different aspects. Governments don't want to be responsible for buildings, right. But they can provide balance sheets. They can provide downpayment assistance. They can provide facade grants. So if everybody comes together and understands the process, they can figure out how to work it out.   Eve: [00:42:20] Yeah, they could provide relationships with banks and banks to the table. They could provide a lot of things. This has been really fascinating but I want to ask you one wrap-up question before we finish for today. Or actually two, I have to say, and that's what's next for you and what's next for the Alliance?   Jim: [00:42:37] Well, two things. Myself, personally, my wife and I have a small development company called Heirloom Properties. So, we have been evaluating both opportunities we have on our own lot, we have a single family house on a lot that at one point in time, in the past before we bought it, had a garage on it. And so as rules in Minneapolis have changed over the past couple of years, you know, we were looking into an accessory dwelling unit, a backyard cottage. And then, and now with the new rules we're contemplating, hey, why just stop with a backyard college? Why not a backyard duplex? And so we started thinking about that. But in the meantime, as that happened, we were saving some money up to work on a project like that. There was another vacant lot in our neighborhood that we are pursuing to build a small multiplex. And so, my wife works in affordable housing and so she does project management for big projects. But even, even affordable housing these days is not what it used to be. And so she's spending a lot of her time trying to figure out how to provide housing for folks who are not at the lowest of low income levels, because at this point, most of our federal and state subsidies are going toward the lowest of low income levels. And that's great. And that's desperately needed. But the challenge is, is that's not enough to house the rest of the folks need to house. And so both her projects at her day job, they're a bit larger, maybe 60, 70, 80 unit buildings and then some of the products that we're looking at that are 2 or 6 or 12 units that we're looking at personally in our in our neighborhood are kind of getting at that in-between scale that we luckily now, as a city, have come to a conclusion that we're actually going to allow again, we're actually going to make sure that it's possible to put more than a single family house on, you know, 60 or 70 percent of the land in our city that was previously allowed to only have one unit on it.   Jim: [00:44:31] So we're seeing in the last five years that the Alliance has been around, we're seeing places start to get some of those pieces of the puzzle right. And we're happy to have been a part both politically as well as from a technical perspective of some of those changes here in Minneapolis. But the work is is large. There are a lot of lot of places that need both cultural and technical changes to the way that they look at real estate, especially at the small scale of buildings, and so the Alliance is kind of doing a couple of things moving forward. We are expanding our services to support governments and non-profits and institutions, many of which have neighborhoods directly, either target neighborhoods if they're a city or if they are an institution where they have a neighborhood adjacent to the place that they maybe have their campus or facilities. And so, largely those places are trying to help jumpstart a real estate process and/or if you're, if they're in a hotter market, provide housing. If you're a hospital and you employ a massive cross-section of humanity in terms of income levels and household sizes and you're trying to make sure your workforce is nearby and doesn't have to commute an hour one way, there's probably a lack of housing of some type. And so we're trying to help those places create or recreate a viable housing market in the neighborhood. We're also helping to make sure that there are neighborhood services. So just because you have housing doesn't mean you have all the services you need that make it desirable to live there. And so, we're doing mixed use buildings, especially older ones that you can rehab, which is its own sort of trick in itself. How do you help those pieces come together and in assisting in that way? So, sort of, master developers as well as we continue to expand our services both electronically as well as in person to help cities get their rules right and get their processes to re-legalize, in many cases, the developments they already have, the neighborhoods they already have which have 30 and 40 and 50 foot wide lots and small buildings that don't quite conform to the rules that were created after those buildings were built. And so we're unwinding a lot of things, but we're also starting to create really fun new things. And one of the projects that we're gonna be working on here this Spring, especially as we have a little downtime, as many of our in-person events have been postponed, is working on getting some of these technical tools to all line up, to have the right financing tool box, to have the right building and zoning recommendations and policies, to be able to use the tool Step Buildings to help people envision the kinds of buildings they want, not just the buildings that someone has figured out maybe they can make some money at doing and we'll just keep doing it over and over and over. But to say, hey, you know, we want these kind of buildings in our neighborhood. How do we make those happen, and how do we join together as neighbors to maybe do it ourselves if no-one's going to come for us to do it? And that's largely the case. No one's coming to your neighborhood to do the real estate development you want to see, most likely. If they were, they'd be there already. And so we're trying to help democratize the information so that people can use their relationships and create the local systems to encourage the kind of things and to make them happen, actually just to make them happen. You know, we're here. We can run around the country and as an organization and just train people all day or give them advice. That's not what we're here to do. Our goal is really here to actually help people learn the skills, but to use those skills to actually make the buildings happen, to rehab them, to make, to build them new. That's that's what we're here to do. We're not here just to talk about this. We got plenty of advocacy and policy organizations. And so we hope that those of you who may be listening to this hearing about us for the first time. If you're waiting for someone to come, that person you're waiting for might be you and your neighbor. And so, think about what your role could be as a small developer and even if that's not your role, we need champions for many of the changes we need to re-legalize our places, to make them vibrant, to make them, and especially in the wake of our current crisis, ant-fragile. To be able to grow in strength through adversity, not just survive. So we think small-scale development is probably the way forward, once we get over the near-term humanitarian crisis of warding off a virus. We're still going to have the very same housing challenges, the very same economic challenges that we did six weeks ago. And so how do we deal with that as a country and as our neighborhoods?   Eve: [00:49:11] Well, this has been really, really fabulous. And I think that in the next five years, we're going to see a whole lot more incremental developments. So thank you very much for your time. and I'm sure we're gonna be talking again.   Jim: [00:49:22] Appreciate the opportunity, Eve. Thank you so much.   Eve: [00:49:27] Bye.   Eve: [00:49:27] That was Jim Kumon who leads the Incremental Development Alliance. The alliance is focused on helping locals strengthen their neighborhoods through small-scale real estate projects. They provide training and technical assistance to anyone interested in tackling projects that you are probably all familiar with. Housing, retail and mixed uses projects on main streets and in neighborhoods. Projects typically range from one to 20 units. These were once everyday development exercises, but have been pushed aside in favor of larger, more efficient projects of scale. Today, it's a challenge navigating zoning codes and financial institutions to get projects like this built. And that's what the alliance focuses on.   Eve: [00:50:34] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today's episode at my website evepicker.com. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.   Eve: [00:50:51] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Jim, for sharing your thoughts. We'll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve: [00:00:14] Hi there, thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.  My guest today is Ommeed Sathe. Ommeed is Vice President of Impact Investments in Prudential Financial’s Office of Corporate Social Responsibility.  His unit manages a portfolio of $1 billion in impact investments. That’s a big number and it doesn’t seem like Ommeed is slowing down. Ommeed grew up in a family who felt public service, through work or volunteerism, “was fundamental.” And that has clearly rubbed off. Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Ommeed on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.   Eve: [00:01:42] Well hello Ommeed, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.   Ommeed Sathe: Absolutely, Eve, it's a real pleasure to be with you.   Eve: Well, that's great. So I wanted to start with your title, Vice President of Impact Investments at Prudential. What does that mean?   Ommeed: [00:01:59] Yeah, so I head up the company’s impact investing activities, and that's obviously one of those terms that kind of sounds OK, but it doesn't really necessarily clearly translate. But what it is, for us, is it's a portfolio of investments we've made that are trying to have both a financial and a social impact. And so they are genuine investments that try to make money, but we invest them exclusively in projects that we think have outsize social investments and in particular in the types of projects that our company and traditional capital markets wouldn't do otherwise.   So, they're really meant not to be sort of a subset of what the company was doing already, but to be a portfolio, to be used to be catalytic and differentiated and to invest in places we wouldn't be investing otherwise and in projects we wouldn't be looking at otherwise.   Eve: [00:02:51] So how big is the portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:02:53] At the moment, it's, it's about a billion dollars.   Eve: [00:02:57] Wow, that's pretty big. Can you give us some examples of the things you've invested in?   Ommeed: [00:03:02] We have sort of two halves of the portfolio. One is around very physical types of projects, affordable housing. We've made a lot of investments in our hometown of Newark in big transformative developments and redevelopments. And then we also do some interesting work around new ways of doing agriculture, new ways of sort of growing and feeding the planet. And that's sort of on the physical side of the work. And on the other side of the portfolio is investments in really interesting social purpose businesses. And those have been largely focused on financial inclusion. And then on education and how do we re-skill and retrain the labor force?   Eve: [00:03:42] That's pretty great. How would you define impact in real estate? How does Prudential define it? Like, both of you?   Ommeed: [00:03:50] Yes. So, this is actually a really fascinating question. So, I think there's probably three ways to think about it. You can think about it just sort of on the the most, I'd say, straightforward which is, you know, units of affordable housing, square feet of redevelopment, square feet of the building, and if it's a LEED platinum. Your, sort of, the physical characteristics of the development very much sort of very clear outputs of sort of what the real estate is. I think the second way to think about it is what's sort of the community level and at the residents’ level. And so how are residents’ lives being impacted and living in certain places? How are services? What's the quality and satisfaction of tenants? So very sort of a consumer impact as well as in looking at sort of the communities in which this real estate is. So, are these places where investment wasn't being made and after you make these investments, does more investment come in? Are those investments leading to good outcomes or is it just catalyzing sort of unhealthy gentrification? Those are a couple of dimensions. And then I think the third and both, sort of, most qualitative and trickiest maybe to sort of measure, but something that really drives us is, is this work in any way catalytic? Does it change the trajectory of what a market is going towards? Does it prove that a new way or a new type of housing or new type of sort of investment strategy that could work thing be replicated in other places?   Eve: [00:05:18] That last one must be more of a hope than a metric that you can measure.   Ommeed: [00:05:23] That's right, it's true that it's nothing than more of a hope. But I'll give you some examples, maybe that last one, because I think it kind of brings it to life.   So, you know, one of the things that we've been looking at and I think we've done with the great sort of sort of architectural firms is how do you say we take lots that have been deemed substandard, often sort of ineligible even for development and develop really creative structures and housing and building models that can sort of create value on land that is otherwise essentially worthless. And are there ways to sort of replicate that and make that go to other places? Because it's interesting, right? Like, you know, with land getting so expensive and all the prime development sites gone. If you're trying to get more affordable housing into sort of affluent markets, sometimes figuring out really creative design solutions for substandard or non-standard lots is one way to do that. Another thing that we've done sort of I think has been really catalytic. We worked with some colleagues down in Washington, D.C. They had recently passed a new ordinance that required much higher levels of stormwater retention. And a lot of our city's stormwater is actually a sort of surprisingly under-appreciated problem. Enormous source of pollution, flooding. And so, cities are starting to try to grapple with how they do this better.   [00:06:37] And so D.C. passed this ordinance requiring much higher levels of stormwater capture. You know, one of the few ways you can do that on a development is you can either sort of build in essentially bladders in the basement to capture water or green roofs on the roof. But what DC did that was really interesting was they permitted people to fill some of their obligation by making improvements to green infrastructure in other parts of the city. And so we helped fund a bunch of improvements to green infrastructure and you got essentially tradeable stormwater credits. And so this was a version of sort of what people talk about wanting to try to do with carbon by creating tax and trade mechanisms and, but done at the local level around a whole novel problem with stormwater. And so that's sort of an example of something that I think we helped build the first green infrastructure products and create the first tradable stormwater credits. And we think that solution is really interesting. And we also think other cities will see that, and potentially try re-create a similar solution.   Eve: [00:07:35] That is catalytic. So, you know, when you were talking about unusable lots, I was thinking about an article I read recently about the downsizing of some freeways and the land that that might free up. For, you know, development use. I think that's a really interesting thesis in this time when we're starting to see autonomous vehicles and a lot of people who don't want to own cars. It's really interesting to think about where land is available, right?   Ommeed: [00:08:04] I think it is. And it's still strange to me, actually, because there's a sort of funny meme, right, that what will happen in Silicon Valley finally invents a technology that allows us to build the second story. And, you know, I think that spirit is kind of true even in New York City. You go around and see so many easy and obvious potential sites that you could build on. Sites that are being used for car dealerships, parking lots, abandoned, your public assets, you know, right of ways. And it's amazing just how much of that land is there when you start to look. And it does feel like some of the lowest hanging fruit, in terms of how do we find opportunities to create more affordable products. Again, it may not be the best location in the city, but it's certainly habitable and buildable and safe. And I think it's been really interesting. We worked with this great architecture firm down in New Orleans the Office of John Tate, and they've done really interesting stuff thinking about how to do that.   Eve: [00:09:02] Yes. Yeah, I know Jonathan really well. He was, he actually did the first crowdfunding offering with us.   Ommeed: Oh, there you go, it's a small world.   Eve: It was one of his Starter Homes on an odd lot. Pretty fascinating times. Do you have metrics that you've developed to test against projects that come to you?   Ommeed: [00:09:23] We do. There's a couple of ways, and I think goes back to sort of thinking about the different impacts, you're capturing metrics for things like the number of affordable housing units, the square feet of, extra, square feet of Y that's fairly straightforward to capture. You know, I heard this quote the other day. I thought it sort of kind of interesting. We can grind to a fine dust that we can easily ascertain. And yet sometimes in doing that, we don't really measure what's most important. And I think the things that are most important are somewhat, by their nature, more ambiguous. And so some of this is actually the process of asking those questions. So, I'll give you an example with affordable housing. You know, we know it's desperately needed and in many affluent communities. And yet a lot of times where affordable housing gets built isn't necessarily the, you know, the most affluent areas. Is that a good or a bad thing? Right. You know, it's not a question that can be answered with a single metric, because it matters in terms of looking at the public education system and saying, OK, you know, are there good education resources or are there community resources? You know, there's research by Raj Chetty that sort of speaks to just how relevant place really is the social and economic mobility.   [00:10:27] And that data is not. It's really interesting and compelling, but it's certainly not black or white, in terms of its implications. And so one of the things I do think we're trying to do a better job and actually think is something that's so under-appreciated in real estate is really to survey tenant residents and try to get data from the people who live in buildings,  about their lives getting better, what's happening actually as a result of being in this complex here, because I think some of these questions are important questions, but they're not solvable with the data we have. And yet, you know, every other sector of our economy, it's you know, if you could buy shoes from Zappos, every one of those companies is has a net promoter score and wonders what it is and as careful about it and uses that as a leading indicator of telling you whether something's working. And yet in real estate and I don't know about you, but no landlord has ever, no only one I should say, has ever asked me, like, was I happy.   Eve: Yeah, yeah, interesting.   Ommeed: And it's striking, the one landlord that did ask me that question was absolutely, no surprise, the single best landlord I ever had.   Eve: Often landlords are pretty scared of the tenants.   Ommeed: [00:11:32] And it's funny, I do think one of the trends we're seeing that I think is a really interesting trend, is that as far as people I see and real estate are really moving in this direction, that so much of real estate development used to be about the physical development of the assets, actually getting the things built and getting it through entitlements and through reviews and all of that. And so, the field really focused on the physical construction and not the management and hospitality.   But you just look at sort of food halls or even kind of we-work and co-working spaces. All of those models are fundamental, about taking spaces that exist and thinking about how do we manage them better, how do we program them better? How do we get more stuff out of the same space? More and more, I think real estate is actually moving to hospitality. That if you think about hotels, right, with hotels, you think about brands and you think about your experience. You don't really think about hotels and associate them with the physical structure. To some extent, everything you see and experience is on the inside.   Eve: [00:12:31] Yes. So, you know, I interviewed someone a couple of weeks ago you might be interested in them in Amsterdam. He has a spin-off, an architect who spun off a company called Superlofts. You can find it on my website.   And it's very interesting because he creates a community before he, before they even start designing the building. They start meeting with groups of people who want to buy these little condominiums and talk to them about the needs, the dreams. Almost, he said like a video - what would you like a day in your life to look like? And when they have a group of like-minded people together they will start to kind of design the physical space around them. It was fascinating.   Ommeed: That sounds amazing.   Eve: Really fascinating, beautiful architecture as well. So I think there's a lot of really interesting innovation going on. So, why Prudential? That might be surprising to some people.   Ommeed: [00:13:25] Yeah, it is, I mean, it's sometimes surprising to me as well. My connection to Prudential's at a couple of levels. One, before I joined the company, I was in New Orleans working after Hurricane Katrina. And in that role, I led redevelopment for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. And we were tasked with trying to really catalyze neighborhood-based redevelopment in the wake of the storm. And in doing that, in that role, got to work with just about every kind of capital source around the country, philanthropic, government, private sector. And we were trying to coalesce all of that capital around really important, really transformative projects. And Pru is just one of the best people we worked with. And in that experience, and it really shaped for me how different the access to capital is by place. So I'd come from working in New York largely in the boom times ahead of the financial crisis, working on often quite foolish projects with unimaginably easy access to capital. And even if they'd worked, relatively low returns and then going to New Orleans and having really vital projects with great returns, but just in a place where there was almost no capital available. And seeing how important it was to have sort of, you know, investments and capital to try to move away from a very limited set of places which have kind of capital they need for reinvestment.   [00:14:45] You know, I think a lot of people who are urbanists, I'm sure this will sort of resonate, you know they've grown up in New York, San Francisco, D.C., Boston, you know real estate we call the sexy 7, right, The 7 kind of big, urban markets where capital is unbelievably plentiful. And that's not really reflective of what it's like to work in most urban communities around this country. You know, in most urban communities, even good projects have a hard time finding financing. And it's even harder for projects that are really sort of aspirational at a social level because a lot of those projects are often coming from entrepreneurs or untested, who have limited ability to manage pre-development. The work that you described in terms of sort of crowdfunding and some of that I think is a really interesting angle to bringing capital into those markets. But another is sort of getting institutional money like Prudential to have dedicated programs that really start to look in these non-traditional markets and opportunities.   Eve: [00:15:41] Right. So I've done a lot of real estate development like that in Pittsburgh, which is a city that was in pretty bad shape when I started doing the work I did and I relied heavily on public funds and the mayor's office and the Urban Redevelopment Authority to fill that role. But I imagine that many cities don't have those sorts of resources for developers. And I also think those funds have dried up a little. So that makes Prudential's role perhaps even more important.   [00:16:07] Yeah. No, it does. And I think we're trying to push ourselves to get even more early stage with our investments. You know, I think some of the stuff we've done in Newark has actually been very large projects and in some other markets we've been able to do projects which are 50 to 100 million dollar kind of projects where we'll be investing 10 or 20 million at a time. But where I think the real need is to have, you know, institutions like us really push to do more in pre-development to do more with sort of, you know, young and minority development firms and to really try to continue to push earlier, because the earlier you get, the more you see that acute lack of capital. You know, when you really get into the machinery of real estate, you see why and how access to capital is such a profound differentiator. It's not really the project economics that blow things up. You know, what we see is people get stuck in pre-development.   Eve: Yes.   Ommeed: [00:16:57] You know, they get stuck having, you know, bought land and thinking it would take them a year to get permits. And now it's two years and they don't have money to make the payment on an acquisition loan or they've got to pay for another X, Y, Z of permitting or entitlement costs. And they just can't get the project to the finish line. Typically, you know, the most underserved markets are often also the ones that are actually most difficult to operate in because they don't have some of the robust public sectors like you saw, even saw in Pittsburgh, right, and so you couple those challenges and we really do see it as being a pretty acute need to solve.   Eve: [00:17:32] Prudential would actually go in at such an early stage of pre-development stage? That's pretty unusual.   Ommeed: [00:17:38] I want to be clear we haven't done it yet, and I think it's sort of where we want to get to. You know, as we see it, adding a part of this is just the evolution of the real estate market. When we started this program seven or eight years ago, I'd say, it was really just not a lot of capital flowing in. Like, take a town like Newark, there was almost no equity capital to support redevelopment. And it really felt like even our financing at the project level was pretty transformative. Fast forward to where we are today, I'd say, if you can get a project to being at a closing even in Newark, there's a lot of sources that'll provide equity capital now, but it's the money to support the pre-development and planning, entitlement, that stage of the work that's really very, very scarce. Because that money's so scarce, it means that the people who do big projects are going to look can be and have a certain set of values and approaches and people with new ideas and real creativity won't be able to be even having a seat at the table.   Eve: [00:18:36] So a billion dollars now. What's what's the goal for this portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:18:40] There's a couple of ways you can go, right? Like most people in financial services, you get to a billion and then you want to get to 10 billion. And bigger is just better. Actually, I think given sort of our mandate to be catalytic and creative, we're trying to actually push to some extent to the opposite. So, not to necessarily get the portfolio bigger, but actually try to push earlier down the risk spectrum and really push ourselves to be more catalytic and more transformative and more creative rather than build to be bigger. Because I actually think this is sort of in my experience, once something gets bigger, it actually gets more vanilla, more predictable and usually if it makes sense, there will be lots of people who'd be willing to invest.   Eve: [00:19:23] Got it. That's really fascinating. What percentage of the total Prudential portfolio is the impact portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:19:32] Good question. I'd say there's two ways to think about that. Right, so when you're an insurance company, you have a tremendous amount of assets. But somewhere in the neighborhood for Prudential, you know, five hundred billion dollars of assets, let's say. But that's not really a very accurate measure because the way insurance companies are regulated, ninety five percent of what they do has to be in very safe, predictable bonds and rated kind of loans. And so, the portfolio we manage is essentially 5 percent of the company’s risk appetite.   Eve: [00:20:06] OK. Well, I know a little bit about the work in Newark through Jonathan Tate. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I think what you're doing there is tackling quite a big problem and quite a big project by the sounds of it.   Ommeed: [00:20:19] Yes. You know, so Prudential's been headquartered here in Newark for the better part of a hundred and forty years, and obviously, the city of Newark has gone through many, sort of evolutions during that time. I think what's interesting, right, is that you can sort of contrast what we're doing now with maybe what people did 30 or 40 years ago. There was obviously a fairly disruptive and difficult period of urban unrest, and the riots and a lot of people fled the city, a lot of companies left the city and there was sort of a cycle of disinvestment for many, many years. And we've done this really interesting research, actually, you know, Newark, pre the civil unrest had more urban renewal than anywhere in the country.   [00:20:58] And you can watch these videos and they are just heart wrenching because the helicopter shots of the city. And it looks like Berlin after World War Two. And yet the voice-over on the video is so proud of what they've done.   Eve: Ooh.   [00:21:14] They state literally there's been more, you know, more of urban renewal per person in New York than anywhere else in the country. And this was Newark 1950, and you see actually sort of the devastating impact of that cycle in the community. But you can really see some of that and that's sort of just a random aside. But in the sort of reaction after the civil unrest, a lot of the investment that was made, was made and things like if you've ever been to Newark there's something called the Gateway Center, which is like the Renaissance Center in Detroit. Towers, skybridges connected to transit, you know, kind of fortress style orientation to the urban environment. Instead of doing that, what we decided to try to do sort in this most recent cycle and look, you know, Pru had a role in building those gateway complexes in the 70s and so this is by no means, you know, a story that doesn't sort of involve us.   [00:23:02] But in the most recent sort of time when a company had a choice around building a new tower, rather than build it near any of the train stations or in any of the sort of locations that would have been most accessible to commuters, we built that tower literally in sort of the heart of the city. Now it's on Broad Street, which was aptly named, it's the broadest street in downtown. It's on the side of what used to be a sort of a former shopping strip. So, it's a center where all the department stores and movie theaters used to be in downtown. In building that tower, we also made, I think, a really critical decision with the team I run, to not only just build something for ourselves but to start to invest in all of the sort of transformative developments in and around that location. And the most important of those was an old department store called the Hanes Department Store, which during its heyday was a department store that would have competed with Saks. It had a four-story grand atrium like the Grand Magasin in Paris. People would come up and have these amazing memories of putting on white gloves and dressing up and going to this department store.   [00:23:08] There was the Maple Room and the Pine Room and, you know, we just, it was this incredible legacy experience and actually even had a really interesting role as one of the first places where integration happened in the city. Shopping was actually one of those areas where integration was sort of, one of the first places to happen. So, really a pretty legendary history, but had been closed for 25 years and the building itself had completely fallen apart and we made it sort of our passion project to redevelop that building. And we were able to do it in this incredibly complicated, mixed use way. So, the first floor is retail, which is both big box retail and neighborhood retail. The second floor is offices. Third and fourth floors are housing. 40 percent of the housing was set aside for affordable housing. The retail mix is everything from fintech companies and co-working to really cutting-edge nonprofits. And then, maybe the sort of cherry that made it both the most difficult project I've ever worked on but also the best, was Rutgers University brought in all of their arts and design program into that building and did it in this way that I think is really unprecedented where, first of all there's no separate entrance for the university, the public can go into those spaces. But even intermixed in the Rutgers space are private galleries and a rotating space, right in the front of their space for, you know, kind of community serviing arts nonprofits. They essentially have like six month displays where they can come in and sort of gain visibility and access to resources. And so it's been a real labor of love. And it's physically, that building, plus the Prudential Tower plus Military Park, plus some other things we were doing, started to re-knit together parts of the downtown. So we followed that up with another half a dozen investments that I think are sort of all, again trying to sort of replicate that playbook of mixed income, mixed use development with a mix of both sort of national needed amenities and community serving retail and office tenants that both sort of try to draw exciting new things, but also, you know, cater to some of our legacy businesses.   Eve: [00:25:13] Yeah, so common theme I'm hearing from a lot of people now is that part of the process of keeping a community whole is to provide space, a community hub, space in some way or another for a community to feel that it belongs while improvements are going on around them. Does that make sense?   Ommeed: [00:25:32] Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we had in that building is we, we sort of restored this grand atrium and the grand atrium is actually sort of open to the public year around. And so it becomes this place where you see people, especially in winter here right like, it serves almost like, you know, the function of a town town commons and we sort of made it kind of connect both sides of the building so this is a really kind of interesting passageway.   Eve: [00:25:56] That sounds lovely, I'd love to see it. Perhaps this question is redundant, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think socially responsible real estate is necessary in today's development landscape?   Ommeed: [00:26:07] I do. And it's got a place to play at a lot of different levels. So I think if you look at sort of the institutional level, I think given some interesting things where people are starting to sort of demand that portfolios be LEED certified and have certain environmental obligations, and I think that's something that sort of very both important and do-able at the very sort of macro level for real estate. But then I also think, with what we're facing as a country between the challenges around affordable housing, just radical inequity, and then honestly, we haven't built a lot of housing in this current boom. It's one of the most sort of striking things that's happened is that we haven't built enough housing, we haven't created enough units, and that's driving up the price for everyone. And I do think we, we need capital to be creative and thoughtful about how do you get more going on in places where it's not and get it to a density in a scale that actually starts to bend the cost curve?   Eve: Yes.   Ommeed: [00:26:59] You know, one of the things that, you know, we get asked a lot is sort of, you know, this gentrification question.   Eve: That's a big one.   Ommeed: [00:27:06] And again, I think that that question, it's so much shaped by people's experience in cities like D.C., Boston, New York, cities that are going through these incredible economic booms but have also hardly permitted any housing. If you look at New York, New York City I think last year permitted as much housing as Jersey City. That's one city of eight million people, another three hundred thousand during, you know, year 10 of an economic boom. And so, you know, historically, when we've had economic booms, we've been able to produce a lot of housing. And the thing that's really striking right now, we're just not doing that as a country. And so what's happening is because there's no real housing production and because we've really reduced, for reasons that no one really quite fully understands, geographic mobility, so people aren't moving like they used to, the jobs that are being created and the wealth that's being created in certain places in many cases is all being swallowed back up by people's rent.   Eve: [00:27:59] Interesting.   Ommeed: [00:28:00] The cost of living. And so, you know, I think we are really as a society, not doing what we need to do in terms of connecting people to economic growth.   Eve: [00:28:09] Do you have any ideas about that? I talked to an architect in Australia who's kind of plugging away building affordable, sustainable buildings and making sure that the first buyers are city-serving civil servants who need to be close in. People are taking it from every angle.   Ommeed: [00:28:29] There's no silver bullet. Sure, I do think one of the things that we have to rethink from a design perspective is density.   You go to a city like Vancouver, I mean, I think there's really different ways in which density can be expressed at the street level. And people's experience, you know, people are very poor at actually gauging how dense something is. So, one of those things is I think actually becoming comfortable saying like, you know, we do want to sort of start to think about infill and densification and how do we do that? I do think some of the stuff that's happening on the West Coast about accessory dwelling units and trying to come up not with sort of solutions that, you know, are project solutions, but are actually these kind of decentralized solutions, making it much more easy for people to add a unit, or what Minneapolis did with eliminating single family zoning.   Eve: Yeah.   [00:29:19] I think it's really, really interesting. A few other things we've seen that we're really excited by - in Texas and Colorado and a few other places, we've seen this interesting move to take assets that were built in say the 1970s and 80s as large market-rate rental and kind of reverse convert those to affordable housing. And the way that works is that basically in exchange for really substantial tax abatements, buyers go ahead and dedicate a portion of those units to being affordable and they end up working out roughly the same to what it would be if they bought those buildings and invested lots into to aesthetic renovations and tried to remarket them as luxury. So, these are essentially perfectly lovely units built except with carpet and cherry wood that rather than ripping all that out and trying to convert them into luxury housing, you leave them like they are and convert them into good quality, you know, mixed income developments.   Eve: Yeah, yeah, yeah.   Ommeed: [00:30:16] I think some of the reverse conversions are really interesting too, as another theme as to how we can get affordability on scale.   Eve: [00:30:22] You know, in Melbourne, Australia, years ago, I was really fascinated, there was, the zoning department implemented densification along major roads where there was infrastructure. It's actually a really sprawly city. And so, what they permitted was much higher density buildings, housing, along roads that had bus and train tram. It's been really interesting watching it unfold, you know you can really see the physical spaces changing. But it's a really smart move to take existing infrastructure in a very big city, which is going to be very expensive to increase, and find a way to create density around it. I thought that was pretty smart.   Ommeed: [00:31:06] Yeah, it does sound like a really elegant solution.   Eve: [00:31:09] There's another neighborhood there that I know has now put an overlay district in place where they are not permitting anymore parking spaces moving forward. They're really trying to eliminate them completely. It's a very dense, mixed-use neighborhood, very close to the central business district. So, they're making some pretty bold moves with zoning to try and handle what is sort of a rapid sprawl.   And of course, that means if you can live close in and you can have a smaller unit and you don't need a car because you've got access to infrastructure and it's more affordable. Right.   Ommeed: [00:31:42] Right. You know, it's interesting, I question required parking. Most of the development we've done has has either had minimal or no parking associated with it because the zoning codes here were permissive and it's a real driver of, as you said, you know, you can create more units, you can reduce the cost. Parking minimums are, I think, a hidden and really destructive part of many zoning codes.   Eve: [00:32:05] They've been very destructive, not just for housing, but even when you think about retail strip malls with seas of parking in front of them which are really all about parking minimums.   So are there any other current trends in real estate development that you think are important?   Ommeed: [00:32:19] We've talked about a lot and it's not so much a real estate trend, but this decline in human mobility and our declining mobility rates, I think is just one of those fascinating social trends that I think has implications for place and how we do things that I don't think we fully quite grapple with. I do also think that, you know, we're entering an increasingly dark age for retail.   Eve: Yes, we are.   Ommeed: [00:32:44] You know, there's aesthetic implications to that but it's hard to imagine true vibrant urban places without vibrant retail corridors. And so trying to figure out sort of what else can we do on ground floors? We see this problem in Newark, almost every square foot of retail we've had has had to be filled by a food and beverages. And even then, after a while, you reach saturation. So, what can you do with spaces that actually are interesting and inviting, and, you know, if you are pessimistic on the future retail?   Eve: [00:33:14] This is a dilemma, because other countries we're not really, not really seeing the demise of retail in the same way. It's really a shame for us. Right. It's very difficult.   Ommeed: Very difficult.   Eve: You also engage the community, right, in your work in Newark?   Ommeed: [00:33:30] We do. One of the things that's been interesting in Newark is that I think there's this big cadre of, you know, of what people would call sort of anchor institutions, and that have been a nice kind of vehicle to sort of get all of those different institutions to really try to, sort of, really think differently about this community engagement and not sort of recreate what happened in the 1950s and 60s in terms of just sort of having this kind of urban renewal from the top down.I think part of what we've tried to do in insurance in the beginning is, in finding a way to sort of help smaller infill neighborhood based projects, you actually get to interact with people in community and get just an insight, at a much more human level, into what's sort of driving people and what needs there are felt. I think wherever you can, trying to sort of really, I think encourage transparency.   [00:34:21] We've, you know, we've been really fortunate, I think, to have good leadership at the Mayoral level in Newark and I think they have really forced and encouraged that same kind of community convening, but also done it in a way that, I think, you know, too often those meetings are either sort of lip service or not willing to sort of push back on these issues, let's say, around gentrification. And what I think the Mayor has done a really good job of here is both coming up with good policies around inclusion and local hiring, but also signing up for the fact that, look, inclusive growth also means we have to be able to grow and do things the right way and that if you look at a city like Newark, almost everything we've built has been vacant buildings are vacant lots.   [00:35:04] You know, there's still a long arch before you get into displacement. And actually, if you're adding units of affordability and doing that, you can be constructive in taking the edge off of those pressures.And so I think there's been a really good set of conversations that aren't trying to sort of demonize either side, but trying to get to a pretty reasonable resolution. So, we've been fortunate here.   Eve: [00:35:28] So I'm going to just ask a wrap-up question. Where do you think the future of real estate impact investing lies for the country? It's really just a little blip right now. Right?   Ommeed: [00:35:39] Hmm. I think it can be two things at the same time. I do think there's a real role for institutional capital in pushing more investment into things like affordable housing preservation and sustainable large scale development and I think that's largely about sort of preserving existing assets and upgrading existing assets and I think that's one scenario that impact real estate can do. And then I think there's a need for the kind of catalytic capital that we have to really push money into the places where there's just very little capital availability. I think you could see two, sort of very different approaches, depending on sort of the type of capital of the scale and the places they go, but both are needed.   Eve: [00:36:23] Well, it sounds like a fascinating job you have and probably most people listening to this, are very surprised that Prudential is kind of taking a lead in this and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you invest in. It sounds pretty fabulous.   Ommeed: [00:37:37] Well, thank you. I'm so excited to go look at sort of some of the examples you mentioned.   Eve: Ok, we'll talk again soon, OK?   Ommeed: Thanks.   Eve: That was Ommeed Sathe. For Ommeed, investing is more than a way to make money. It’s a way to make a difference. His portfolio at Prudential has already supported the creation of well over 1,000 housing, 250 hotel rooms and plenty of retail space in Newark.  But most importantly while other funds aspire to reach 10 billion dollars once the 1 billion hurdle has passed, Ommeed's aspirations differ. Rather than go bigger he'd like go riskier - with untested developers and untested ideas in untested neighborhoods. You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today’s episode at my website, evepicker.com.  While you’re there sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate and while building better cities.   Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, and thank you Ommeed, for sharing your thoughts with me.   We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Liz Williams interviews Jonathan Tate on museum architecture and design

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: Hey, everyone, this is Eve Picker, and if you listen to this podcast series, you're going to learn how to make some change.   Eve Picker: Thanks so much for joining us on this podcast. I'm Eve Picker, and my life revolves around cities, real estate, and crowdfunding. In this podcast series, we'll be digging deep to discover how we can build better cities by building better buildings.   Eve Picker: My guest today is friend, and colleague, Josh McManus. Josh describes himself as a problem solver, strategy implementer, and idea activator, and I know all three to be true. He works in post-industrial cities with entrepreneurs, corporations, and foundations to help people positively transform the places that they love. He's obsessed with place-based change. We have that in common.   Eve Picker: Previously, Josh worked with Rock Ventures' team in Detroit, helping to buy and renovate hundreds of millions of square feet of empty space in downtown Detroit. Rock Ventures serves and connects Quicken Loans founder, and Cleveland Cavaliers Chairman Dan Gilbert's portfolio of more than 100 companies.   Eve Picker: Nationally, Josh is a Marshall Memorial Fellow and a Next American Vanguard. Locally, he has helped found multiple organizations and has served on a variety of institutional boards in his collection of adopted hometowns, including Chattanooga, Tennessee, Detroit, Bar Harbor, and New Orleans. His thoughts have been featured by Forbes, Fast Company, The Economist, Entrepreneur, GOOD, USA Today, and The Huffington Post.   Eve Picker: If you want to know more about Josh after you've listened to this podcast, please visit EvePicker.com, where you'll find links and other goodies on the show notes page and where you can subscribe to my newsletter on all things real estate impact.   Eve Picker: Hi, Josh. How are you this morning?   Josh McManus: Doing great.   Eve Picker: Thank you so much for joining me. I know quite a lot about you, but our listeners don't. I know that you're always moving, and I'm wondering what and where you're working right now.   Josh McManus: I am in Dearborn, Michigan this morning. I'm fortunate to have spent a lot of time in Detroit, and Dearborn over the last 10 years. My work right now is mostly to support Ford Motor Company, as they transform from a past that has been just about cars to a future that's about movement and mobility, overall.   Eve Picker: That's pretty innovative stuff. Your background has been- you've been involved in a lot of real estate recently in under-served cities. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?   Josh McManus: Sure. I actually realized recently that it goes back to my childhood. I grew up in the shadows of a Goodyear plant in Georgia, and the life and death of that little town came and went with what was going on in that factory, so I've spent the entirety of my career working in post-industrial places. One of the best tools for changing the trajectory of a place is re-imagining real estate. I've worked in Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Akron, and then spent a lot of time in Detroit. With each passing set of interventions, have moved up and up in the scope of ambition of the projects that I've worked on.   Josh McManus: In the last 10 years, I've been very fortunate to work on some really large-scale projects. I got to serve with the team at Rock Ventures, which has amassed over 14 million square feet of real estate in downtown Detroit - over 100 buildings - and I've been party to taking most of those buildings from low, or no occupancy to full, or near-full occupancy.   Josh McManus: In the recent work with Ford, I was also very fortunate to be party to helping make the announcement of Ford's return into their home city of Detroit, with the acquisition of Michigan Central Station, which is really turning into a living laboratory for the future mobility. It was this iconic abandoned structure that's now getting new life and will be online and operational in 2021, I believe.   Eve Picker: That's pretty big and exciting stuff. What's your background, and what path led you to what you're working on now, and this real estate reinvention?   Josh McManus: Actually, I also had the revelation recently that I come into real estate rightly so. My paternal great grandfather, and paternal grandfather were in the real estate business in Georgia and had some commercial and residential transactions and holdings. Then I spent this blended upbringing, where my dad was a CEO, my mom's an artist, and I was torn between those two polarities of doing beautiful and good things for the world and doing business things.   Josh McManus: I went on to get business degrees, both undergraduate, and graduate, but most of my work focused on how to leave places better than you found them. I eventually came up with this reconciliation, I call it, for purpose - instead of for profit, for purpose - which is attempting to work at the intersections of moral imperative, and market imperative.   Josh McManus: All of my work in real estate is very much in that direction, which is how do you make places both humane, and maximization machines for human potential, but how do you also make them fiscally feasible, so that you can do the projects again, and again, and at scale. It's a fine line to walk, but it's really where my interests are is how do we build for-purpose places that serve people well, serve communities well, and serve capital interests, to the extent that they have to?   Eve Picker: I love the idea of leaving places better than you found them. It sounds easy, but it's- probably the most difficult thing about it is that people have different ideas about what 'better' is, don't they?   Josh McManus: Yes, absolutely. Real estate redevelopment is a very loaded subject right now [cross talk]   Eve Picker: It certainly is.   Josh McManus: -national conversations on things like gentrification, which are understandable; while, at the same time, there's national and global conversations about economic stagnation. People are very clear on things they don't like - when people get pushed out, or when people can't stay in a place, or can't thrive in a place ...   Josh McManus: That in-between space of how do you make places work for everybody is oft talked about, but very little delivered. I think that's why I've had such a consistent interest in it - how do we build places that maximize the potential for all that are able to retain talent that already exist there, but to attract new talent at the same time? I feel like it's one of the few things that could be a lifelong pursuit, because it's complex enough, it's going to evolve. I know you feel the same way. It's the problem that I'll never solve, but I think I'll always love working on it.   Eve Picker: Be sure to go to EvePicker.com and sign up for my free educational newsletter about impact real estate investing. You'll be among the first to hear about new projects you can invest in. That's EvePicker.com. Thanks so much.   Eve Picker: Yeah, I think you're right ... The interesting thing about my interviewing, people I've interviewed so far, they're all tackling the problem from a different angle. It's absolutely fascinating. Their backgrounds have led them to a different place where they have different skills, and they may be able to help in a different way. I don't know how you get them all together. It's very difficult, and it is, as you said, very loaded. Developers are not very popular at the moment, although they may be the answer, in some ways, somehow.   Josh McManus: Actually, I think there's a new- there's an emergent field. This has been one of the hard things for me ... Going back to when I think you and I met, probably a dozen years ago?   Eve Picker: Yeah, it was a long time ago.   Josh McManus: We met in sort of this 'island of misfit toys' faction - the old gatherings of CEOs for Cities. What was fascinating about that is that you had ... I was an early social entrepreneur. You were doing both that place-based change, and development work. Then there was a mix of other people that really shouldn't have intersected with each other.   Josh McManus: What I've felt since then is there is this emergent field. I guess my resume would say that I've been proxy to a lot of development. I, by no means, would consider myself a developer, and I don't know that I ever will, but it feels like, to me, that there's an emergent field that is something slightly different from developer that needs a name. It doesn't have that name yet.   Eve Picker: Yeah, that's interesting. Something to ponder. What is real estate impact investing, from your perspective?   Josh McManus: Overall, I think that we are on the precipice of democratization of finance in a way that's really- that we've certainly not seen in our lifetimes. It may have happened in certain ways in the past, where you opened up finance to more people, but the impact falls in this overarching democratization of finance wave that is impending.   Josh McManus: What I mean by that is I've always ... In some of the economic-theory stuff that I've read, there's this notion of perfect capitalism. A lot people right now are talking about post-capitalism. I'm still talking about perfect capitalism. It would be where supply and demand met each other in real time and worked its way towards efficiencies.   Josh McManus: Impact real estate investing, to me, is just the opening of the capital markets for good projects to meet good capital at a cost that's sustainable. This is being equipped and enabled by technology, by new modes of thinking, and by measurements that are no longer single bottom line, which I think is totally appropriate.   Josh McManus: The arms race we've had towards single bottom line returns, since Milton Friedman economics set in, is very problematic. This return to impact, to me, feels like a return to understanding our core biological instincts, which are self-preservation. Impact finance, to me, feels like a return to what's right and the pursuit of more perfect capitalism.   Eve Picker: I agree with you on that, but I have to wonder whether it's really working that way yet. At the moment, I feel that impact investors are seeking the good, as well as the return. We know what it looks like to put together an impactful project in a soft market. The returns are never going to be that great. If you offer bigger returns to investors, that works its way down to the occupant of the building, who might be an affordable-housing tenant. I don't know. Do you agree that, somehow, this great divide between the haves and have-nots is not just about the money they have, but also the expectations for the money they have? I'm not sure I'm describing that-   Josh McManus: No, no, I follow. I think there's a couple of forces in play. One is, just as we saw a wave of green-washing over the last 10-15 years - where now everything is organic, and you can't tell whether organic is good or not - we're in a great period of good-washing right now. It seems that every way I turn right now, everybody's an impact investor, because that is fashionable.   Josh McManus: But, then, if you look at the core of some of these folks' beliefs and return expectations, they truly are willing to receive returns that are multiple bottom lines. Then there are some people who have just good-washed and expect the same arbitrary financial returns that they saw under other boom times that have advantaged capital over everything else. I think that's an issue.   Josh McManus: I also think that we are, like you say, on the precipice, but not there yet with truly unlocking all capital with all risk orientations. The work that you've been doing on Reg-CF, with Small Change, is absolutely fascinating to me, because bringing folks who are holding capital that they've only been able to see microscopic returns on, for any sort of lower-risk opportunities - people that have only been able to see a money market account or CDs, these things that have been low, low single-digit returns - allowing those folks to bring capital on that they will now, all of a sudden ... Six-percent returns, to them, looks really good compared to what they've seen in the past.   Josh McManus: I just think we've still got a lot of capital that's yet to be unlocked that has a different return prospectuses on it. I think we've got to be patient in getting all capital onto the playing field and then getting it liquid enough that it can move in the directions of projects where those folks are going to see a proper risk-adjusted return.   Josh McManus: I think, in you guys' shoes, over in what you're doing with Small Change, what's got to be tough is it's a little bit Wild West, right now, so you can't tell ... It's hard to tell the difference between who's good and who's good-washing, and it may take a period of time before that sorts itself out.   Eve Picker: No, I think it is going to take some time, for sure. How much, I'm not sure [cross talk] but we'll try to be patient. When you look at cities - you travel a lot; you go to a lot of cities - do you think socially responsible real estate is necessary in today's development landscape?   Josh McManus: Yeah, I think socially responsible everything is necessary in every landscape [cross talk].   Eve Picker: That was a loaded question.   Josh McManus: -throughout time. I am an avid consumer of a lot of historical information. The times when we put our self in great peril is when we are socially irresponsible. My dad, the CEO, raised me as a capitalist with one caveat. Every time he would remind me that I was a capitalist, he would also remind me that unbridled greed is the Achilles heel of capitalism. Unbridled greed is not socially responsible. It's also not sustainable. We have to have a system that can allow returns on capital, but can allow returns on ... I call them the other ROIs - the returns on individuals. Can individuals maximize their potential? In addition to return on investment, return on individuals.   Josh McManus: Then, also, ROIs in return on ideas. Are we rewarding and testing new ideas? This is especially problematic in the real estate business, because things all too often get too formulaic, too templatized. You and I share a friend in Jonathan Tate, who's looked at the structure and form of multi-family housing units. There is a big problem there, in that it becomes templatized. The capital gets comfortable with that template, but then that template stops serving people in the way that needs to be. I spend a lot of time [cross talk]   Eve Picker: -that, to me, I think is the crux of it all. We need innovation in cities and innovation in place-making, and our financial institutions are not built to be innovators. They [cross talk] looking at real estate development that perpetuates the same, just in the way you said. It's a very difficult cycle to break out of. Yet, I see so many creative developers coming to me with the most amazing ideas. How can we unleash them all and finance them all? I think we would have better cities, right?   Josh McManus: Right. The marketplace has to be there, and then we've got get ... In all of this post-industrial city work I've done, I've worked a lot with large and small foundations, some national, some place-based. Foundation capital is interesting to me, because I think it can and should be the most risk-oriented capital in the whole world.   Josh McManus: An evergreen foundation that throws off five percent of its corpus every year, and that annualized return rates are adjusted over time, that means that that corpus is evergreen. We allow that in the tax code, because we see a benefit; that there should be a benefit to humanity and the society. That most risk-oriented money should be going into a lot of these real estate projects, especially for model-testing purposes, and that's not totally the case right now. We've started to see some of that happen with some foundations, but they ...   Josh McManus: The weird thing that happened, where foundations would get hit up for a lot of capital campaigns; so, then they categorically said, "We're not going to be in the real estate business anymore." I completely understand not building another wing on to a museum or building another dorm room at a college or university, but we need to go back and revisit that amongst the philanthropy crowd to say we probably shouldn't be in the rote real estate business, but we should be in the real estate innovation business. The foundation capital being the most risk-oriented should be the ones that are trying the highest likelihood of transformation efforts on affordable housing.   Josh McManus: It was interesting to me to see the announcement ... I don't know if you saw it or not, from Google, last week. They said they're going to put a billion dollars into affordable housing in the Bay Area. There's a crazy statistic out there; I think it's in the last 10 years, for every 12 new jobs that have been created, only one unit of housing has been created at the same time. You have these incredible pressures ... You see Google putting a billion into that, and that's a survival metric for them. They're not going to be able to retain and attract talent, if people can afford to live.   Eve Picker: Right.   Josh McManus: I think that philanthropic money should be thinking the same way. If you've got a broken real estate market in a community, you may be the intervention of last resort, and you've got to fix that positively or negatively. I'll just give you one example of how we thought about that.   Josh McManus: The work that I did with Rock Ventures is now carried on by a team that's led by a lady named Laura Grannemann. They have gone very, very deep in working to figure out how to stop the blight machine that exists in the Detroit city limits. That has required not just investments in blight reduction, but significant investment in education of homeowners, so that the foreclosure process is slowed and eventually stopped. It's required investments in rehabbing some houses for stabilization purposes - full neighborhood-sized interventions.   Josh McManus: I think that's a good example of the level that philanthropy will have to intervene at to get markets back to operational. Once that happens, maybe they can move on, or maybe they can move to commercial, but we need risk-oriented money in the mix, for sure.   Eve Picker: Yeah. Foundations can invest in lots of other ways that aren't necessarily bricks and mortar but end up being place-making. There are many zoning codes that need to be looked at, for an example, and changed to permit density in a way that they're not written.   Eve Picker: One example that I've watched with interest is in the city of Melbourne, in Australia, where, maybe it might be as long as 10 years ago now, but a few years back, they introduced density zoning overlay along all the major corridors in the city, because those are transit corridors. They were trying to really implement density without the need for adding more cars. It's been really interesting watching that emerge. It's an interesting thesis that's a little tinker with the zoning code to really make development happen in a different way. I'm fascinated by that.   Josh McManus: Yeah.   Eve Picker: In Pittsburgh,  I had a little non-profit, and built a tiny house, which in itself, was plenty of work and interesting, but the most interesting outcome, to me, was that several years later, just last year, the City of Pittsburgh actually created an overlay district for that little under-served neighborhood, so that they could build an experiment with ADUs, and tiny houses, which are really not part of the zoning code. To me, that was an absolutely wonderful outcome of this little $200,000 project. There's ways to experiment and innovate, I think, that go beyond just building something.   Josh McManus: You're bringing attention to something ... One of the things that I've wanted to see created or to help create that I haven't had time is what I describe as this [inaudible] from municipal policy innovation.   Eve Picker: Oh, that'd be fabulous.   Josh McManus: It's under the realization that ... It's funny, because I watched a little bit of the Democratic debate last night, just to see what's going on in that world. I had the realization, studying American history, there was a time when federal policy was the be-all-end-all for impacting local life in America. When we were debating major social, major fiscal policies, then the federal policy was where it's at. The debates that we have on federal policies right now do have local impact, but they don't have the local impact that they did all the way through the 1800s.   Josh McManus: At some point, the game really moved to the states, and state policy started to have a large impact on whether you have state income tax or not, or how you fund education, how you think about crime. During that period, governors were where it was that for impacting day-to-day life at a neighborhood level.   Josh McManus: Today, it's really down to a place where I think your mayor matters a lot more than your president. That throws a lot of people off, because of the drama that's happening on our national policy stage right now. The truth is, I travel so much, and the quality of life at the neighborhood level is much more greatly impacted by the policy choices of a city's mayor than by the president, nor Congress.   Josh McManus: Now, if you follow Twitter all the time and watch TV all the time, you might think otherwise, but the actuality of it, of what your access to transportation is, what your access to parks and public places are, what the quality of your local education offerings are ... The folks that have their hands in that are local politicians, much, much, much moreso than national, or state politicians.   Josh McManus: I think this game of sitting around saying, "Well, when is the state or the feds going to help us fix this stuff?" is completely wrong-headed, and the game is really transforming at a local level, in a lot of cities. My time in Detroit ... I think my biggest fear for Detroit, right now, is that they went unregulated during the bankruptcy period. There was very low regulation on a lot of development activities and other things.   Josh McManus: Now, they're turning back on the development regime that's really dated circa 1950. I think  there's folks that are working hard to try to update some of that, but these communities that have these leftover enforcement regimes that are from times that are no longer here and didn't really deliver results that were optimal for all people, this is highly problematic [cross talk]   Josh McManus: -we need to be scrubbing local zoning issues. The way that you're zoned, from a density standpoint, has a very fast waterfall effect to what's going to happen with education, and transportation. I think a lot of the citizens don't realize that, and they fall into a default NIMBY setting, which is ill-advised, because it means that you make decisions that don't impact your kids, your surrounding neighborhood, your surrounding businesses.   Eve Picker: Right. Well, if you start your school, count me in, because I think [cross talk] I'm always astonished at how much power politicians have and how little they know about urban design, planning, architecture, and the impact that it can have on place, so I think that's really important. Do you think there are any current trends in real estate development that are really important for the future of our cities?   Josh McManus: Oh, yeah. My observation is that we're seeing the radical transformation of the three primary forms of real estate right before our very eyes. These are things that have, at least in the US, have held true almost since our foundation. I'll unpack that a little bit.   Josh McManus: On commercial real estate, we've existed off of a owner-broker model that was predicated on square feet, and years. If I wanted to lease office space for my commercial offices, then I went and met with a broker who represented a property owner, and we had a debate and discussion about how many years and how many square feet I needed for my offices.   Josh McManus: Due to the demands of the property owner and also to the inertia of the whole situation, we typically had a very long-term discussion. The property owner, and the broker really wanted to get me into five years, and they wanted to get me into as much square footage as possible, at as high a leasehold rate as they could get their hands on [cross talk]-   Eve Picker: Both for different reasons, right? One, because the broker is incentivized to do the biggest deal possible, because the way the broker gets paid is on a percentage-commission basis, right?   Josh McManus: Yes.   Eve Picker: Which is also a really broken piece of this all.   Josh McManus: Yeah. What I see happening right now - again, with technology democratization, and ability to understand real-time supply and demand - is almost this continuously variable financing of real estate. You see it manifest the best in things like WeWork, because whereas the CBREs of the world are still out there going, "Well, how many how many square feet and how many years do you want this for?" WeWork is saying, "How many desks do you want, and how many days do you want them for?"   Josh McManus: That's the transformation of the pro forma, because at CB Richard Ellis, they wanted me to rent that space, and they wanted me to put one person per every 300 square feet, or 350 square feet - as much room as I would sign up for, that's what they wanted to get me to. By changing the pro forma around and by aligning the interests of the broker-owner - now that's kind of collapsing into the same thing, sometimes - WeWork says desk and days, and what they don't talk about as much is square feet, because now, if you go into a WeWork office, there's one desk per every 75 square feet.   Josh McManus: What's fascinating about that is that it's a healthier performing pro forma; it's also more environmentally sustainable, because you're conditioning less space. It has a higher energy level to it, so people who work in those spaces feel a different level of energy. You can also shift the pro forma to have more amenities, because you're spending less money on just bare space and conditioning of that bare space [cross talk].   Eve Picker: -it really supports startup, and small businesses who can't really find the time to put all the necessary utilities, and the managers together for themselves, so there's an added bonus, right?   Josh McManus: Well, it also allows them ... It's continuously variable, if it's priced based upon risk. I may price your desk rate higher, if you're a more risky client, or if you want more flexibility. Essentially, what you're paying for is optionality. It also allows you, if you're a startup, to be like, "Well, this month, I have 12 employees, and next month, I have 17. Then we went through a down cycle, and I'm at 11."   Josh McManus: It's more pay-to-play than this encumbrance that so many companies have been so scared of, which is this five-year lease with these ridiculous guarantees, and [cross talk] I think it actually accelerates the economy, because it gives people more options to play the way they want to, when they want to [cross talk] for the landlord and the broker, because they're pricing risk into it. Their margin is still there-   Eve Picker: Josh, early on in my real estate career, I was known as the only developer in Pittsburgh who would actually lease out space for a year at a time. I have some buildings that have smaller office spaces, and I would find these startup tenants, and I would take a risk. They'd stay for a year, and then, they'd stay for another. Some of them ended up staying for 20, maybe because I understood who they were, because I was like that myself. I couldn't find anyone to help me find tenants, because it wasn't worth their while. I love that the internet is producing new models and helping make that happen [cross talk]   Josh McManus: That's commercial, and then what you've got happening on retail-   Eve Picker: Oh, that's huge.   Josh McManus: -is similar. I mean retail, both in the displacement of some retail to online, but the retail that's persisting is highly experiential. I think that you're seeing a lot more revenue-share rents at the ground level. It's aligning the interest of the landlord and the lessee.   Josh McManus: You're also seeing a lot of things like food halls. The way those are working out is the landlord, the broker, and the lessee are sharing costs differently. If I'm in a food hall, the property owner, or the property manager may be the one who's buying some of that back-of-house equipment and carrying the debt, or the cost of that equipment. What that does is create lower barrier to entry for more localized, more authentic offerings to going to place. Then, when that those offerings perform very well, both the landlord and the lessee are sharing in those outcomes [cross talk]   Eve Picker: -co-working for food, right?   Josh McManus: Yeah, totally. The final transformation that I'm watching in real estate is the residential side of it. If you look backwards, if I need to stay a night - I'm in a Marriott, right now. If I needed to stay a night, I would go to a hotel. If I needed to stay for a week, I'd stay for an extended stay. If I needed to stay for three months, then I would go to some corporate housing that had furniture in it. If I needed to stay for longer than that, I could stay for 12 months, or 24 months, but it had to be a fixed increment.   Josh McManus: Now, that's all collapsing. I moved my family down to New Orleans over the winter, and we actually went on Airbnb, and did a long-term rental ... Longer-term rental, so it was more like a 90-day. The algorithm there brokered some adjustments to say, "Hey, you're staying for a longer time. That's good for you; that's good for the landlord. Let's get the economics of this right.".   Josh McManus: This foreshadows, for me, that you're going to have this optionality in the future on a small number of platforms - whether I need to stay one night, one week, or six months - that I'll be able to do that, and the data will help you understand what the right pricing is for both parties. It's democratizing that, and de-risking it. I'm extremely excited, because I think what you're seeing is this melt into something where supply and demand can meet each other in much greater fashion, faster fashion, with more transparency and more benefit in both directions.   Eve Picker: That plays into financing these things, which are all new, and innovative, and financial institutions often don't understand. I have a building that is now a co-working building. I moved from traditional office spaces to getting rent, as the building owner, from desks. I have an operator who manages the building, much like a hotel operator.   Eve Picker: I've been paying my mortgage on time on that building at least 13 years, never missing a payment, and went to them for a credit line to make some improvements, and couldn't get it financed, because they just didn't understand where the income was coming from. We're back to the first issue we talked about, which is the financial institutions really, for whatever reason ... It may not be their fault. They have all their regulations to deal with ... They're squashing the innovation out of the cities. These innovations are happening regardless, and there's going to have to be different financing tools [cross talk] banker is listening here.   Josh McManus: I couldn't agree more, but I don't- I think that wishing for bankers to figure it out ... Bankers always follow the lowest common denominator [inaudible] path. I did have some insight in working for Rock Ventures. That's the holding company that sits next to Quicken Loans. Quicken Loans, in some ways, is in that traditional banking category, but in most ways is not. What I learned in that world is that a lot of people look at that as fin-tech rather than finance-   Eve Picker: That's true.   Josh McManus: I think that there is a major opportunity in the way that this is likely going to get handled at scale, as you're going to see the development of a capital class that's called REfin-tech, real estate fin-tech. I think that's the exact money that is financing things like WeWork, right now. If you look at WeWork, it's not your traditional- it's more your soft banks. It's your folks that understand that data has value; that technology has inherent value, but that you also need to finance large amounts of physical property. It's a blended- it's not just tech. It's physical property and tech living together side by side.   Josh McManus: I think this is going to come off of a completely new capital class, and that, as you start to see exits, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with the IPO of WeWork. If that goes well, that probably forms the foundation of this REfin-tech capital class that will subvert the banks. Once, it subverts the banks, then the banks will try to figure out how to get in that game.   Eve Picker: Yeah, I think that's right. I'm going to shift gears a little bit, because we've been talking a long time, but I want to know the answer to this. You started your- well, I don't know if it was the beginning, but when I first met you, you were doing quite a lot of community engagement work. I'm wondering what community-engagement tools that you've seen or used that you really believe work?   Josh McManus: Around the time- well, probably around the time that we met was the time that I got involved in conceiving and driving what we thought, and what we still think is the world's largest community visioning process. We got over 26,000 people to participate in Ideas for the Future of Chattanooga Tennessee.   Josh McManus: That was fascinating for me, because all the assumptions were totally wrong. We thought it would happen mostly online. It happened 80 percent on paper. We thought that folks would be single-issue voters, and they turned out to be very dynamic in what their interests were in the community. We thought that when you were faced with the issue of vision that people would have really, really wild ideas, and really, en masse, the community had incremental ideas. If you're looking for breakthrough ideas, I learned that big survey processes were not the way to go for it [cross talk]   Josh McManus: After all this time of doing it ... I did that, and then I've done a lot of other approaches. I believe in what I call humanity-centered design. I've got a process that I've developed for it. What it says is don't build nor design things for what you believe is a community, build and design things for what you know is a community.   Josh McManus: Any intervention you build should be with the deep observation of the issues that you're trying to understand and intervene on. What I mean by that is if you want to intervene on affordable housing and you don't have a lot of people involved, who have lived in, are living in, and are currently pursuing affordable housing, then it's going to be really hard to get it right..   Josh McManus: Just as human-centered design has put people in hospital beds, when you're trying to innovate in hospitals, this humanity-centered design says I've got to take it more than just innovation on behalf of the patient. I've got to find innovation on behalf of the entire patient base. I believe in this humanity-centered design. I believe in feedback from the people. I believe in that in two different ways. I think if you need to understand what consensus is, then you mass survey, and representative sample. If you need to look for innovation, you actually have to do constrained dreaming.   Josh McManus: What I mean by that is we did the world's largest community-visioning process, and people wanted a little cleaner, a little less traffic, a little better amenities. Then we did this other process that was called City R&D, where we said, "We've got downtown, we've got the mall area, and we've got the new giant auto factory - we need to connect these three together. What are your wildest ideas for connecting these things together?".   Josh McManus: When you constrain the problem like that, the imagination became really much more bold. People had public art ribbons, and rubber-tired trolleys, and all these different ways that you could connect these assets together that they didn't come up with, when they were just asked to imagine a better community and describe it. I think that community process has to be selective around are you trying to figure out what consensus is, or are you trying to figure out what innovation is?   Josh McManus: The last thing I want to mention is my friend, Mark Wallace, who runs the Detroit River Conservancy, I feel like he really stumbled into, or intentionally drove into new territory from a community-input standpoint with the new park that they just announced on the Detroit riverfront.   Josh McManus: What he did was actually go get a representative sampling. I think it was 21 folks, real people from neighborhoods - mom and her kid, a set of retirees - and these are people that were not your usual suspects in public participation. Then what he did is put them on a plane, and they went to the best parks in the country-   Eve Picker: Oh, that's really cool.   Josh McManus: Yeah. They experienced those parks, and then they came back and worked with the designers to say what they wanted in their park. Instead of [cross talk]   Eve Picker: That's really cool.   Josh McManus: -surveying, he found his representative sampling of the community; made sure that they were unbiased, because they weren't the usual suspects and participants, like people that are in the know. Used their input to come up with a plan that I'm super-super-excited about. I think that may be a next practice, too.   Eve Picker: That's pretty cool. I'm gonna have to interview Mark-   Josh McManus: Oh, yeah, he's great.   Eve Picker: One last question - where do you think the future of real estate impact investing lies, in summary?   Josh McManus: In summary, I think that all of us that care about real estate impact investing have to continue to drive for policies, tools, and patrons, for that matter, who are committed to the democratization of finance. When the controls are in the hands of the commons, instead of in the hands of a small few who may make choices that were based on that unbridled greed that is this Achilles heel of capitalism, that is problematic. Anything that we can build, that we can do, that we can advocate for, that allows finance to further democratize to allow all people to participate in it, and to participate in ways that are fair and just, I think that's what the future looks like.   Eve Picker: Okay, that's great. I do have three sign-off questions that I'm asking everyone because I'd like to tabulate the answers in the end. The first question is what's the key factor that makes a real estate project impactful to you?   Josh McManus: I'll tell you a quick story. There was a time when everybody was talking about Denver. They're like, "Denver's changing. Denver's changing. You gotta go see Denver! Denver is changing!" Then you went to Denver, and it was three blocks-.   Eve Picker: Yes, I remember that.   Josh McManus: Yeah, yeah [cross talk]   Eve Picker: -you could say the same about Corktown. You know that, right?   Josh McManus: Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Absolutely.   Eve Picker: Where is Corktown? Oh, it's this block ...   Josh McManus: Yeah, that's ... my friends, the Cooleys, and they started with the BBQ shop. That does get to how I measure these things. A project that is so impactful that people start to talk about a place, because that one project ... It's happened with a place called The Flying Squirrel in Chattanooga; incredibly designed; really smart bar that really accelerated the south side of the city. That's what I'm looking for in transforming real estate.   Josh McManus: Does the project have the ability to play above its fighting weight, because it becomes contagious? Does it cause adjacent development? Does it get written up because it has particular aspects of it, like Jonathan Tate's odd-lot work that he's done down in New Orleans? Does it set precedent? Does it challenge people? Does it change the status quo? Do you come back to it in 10, 15, 20 years and all sorts of other stuff has happened around it, because it was that compelling unto itself?   Eve Picker: Yes, okay. Then, other than by raising money, how do you think involving investors through crowdfunding could benefit the impact real estate developer?   Josh McManus: When I speak of the democratization of finance, the disassociation of capital and community that happened since the 1950s is very problematic. What has the potential to happen now ... Before we got on the line, I was working through a small investment in a place-based development out of my IRA- a self-directed IRA investment that's in my neighborhood in New Orleans. What that does is reconnect me, my capital, and my community together. I think that's what's to come for the investor is to no longer be a spreadsheet jockey who is just sitting there looking for returns, but to actually participate in the true active community, by the utilization of your capital, to deliver things that include returns for you, but include a lot more.   Eve Picker: Right. Okay, if you could think of one thing that would improve real estate development in the US, what would it be?   Josh McManus: One thing that would improve real estate development in the US would be a rapid evolution of understanding of zoning, because I feel like this is ... The municipal boundaries of most communities were formed at a time of horse and carriage. Most of our zoning requirements still date back to times when heavy industry and light industry were really different from each other. Heavy industry had machines that could suck people into them, and cause major problems, and had major health concerns.   Josh McManus: I look at additive manufacturing, experiential retail, multi-family affordable residential, and I know, in the future, we're going to have to have all of those on the same block with each other. Accelerating to standards that allow for that to happen seems really important to me.   Eve Picker: Yeah? Okay. Josh, it's been really lovely talking to you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't wait to hear about what you're next working on. Thank you so much for your time.   Josh McManus: Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation, Eve.   Eve Picker: That was Josh McManus. I hope you enjoyed listening to him as much as I enjoyed talking to him. Josh gave me three great takeaways. First, he believes we are on the precipice of the democratization of finance. Second, all segments of the real estate market are innovating and transforming rapidly right before our eyes. Third, just as we lived through a wave of green-washing, we are now in a wave of good-washing. We need to be patient for investors to catch up. What did you learn?   Eve Picker: You can read more about Josh on the show notes page for this podcast at EvePicker.com. While you're there, please consider signing up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while making some change. Thank you so much for spending your time with Josh, and I, today. We'll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.  

Eve Picker: Hey, everyone, this is Eve Picker, and if you listen to this podcast series, you're going to learn how to make some change. Thanks so much for joining us on this podcast. I'm Eve Picker, and my life revolves around cities, real estate, and crowdfunding. In this podcast series, we'll be digging deep to discover how we can build better cities by building better buildings. BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: Jonathan Tate is my guest today. I met Jonathan through my crowdfunding platform, Small Change, where he's listed a couple of his projects in New Orleans. Jonathan's architectural practice focuses on architecture, planning, and odd opportunities, such as what to do with odd-shaped lots that no one knows what to do with in New Orleans. I find that immensely appealing, and so do lots of other people.   Eve Picker: Jonathan has received awards, and press, ranging from Curbed to Fast Company. He's a rising star. If you want to know more about Jonathan, after you've listened to this podcast, please visit EvePicker.com, where you'll find links, and other goodies on the show notes page, and where you can subscribe to my newsletter on all things real-estate impact.   Eve Picker: Jonathan, what's your background, and what path led you to where you are today, with your practice in New Orleans?   Jonathan Tate: Well, first, I want to say thank you for having me on, and it's good to talk to you today. Let's see if I can answer the question in terms of background.   Jonathan Tate: I don't know how far to go back, but it might help just to say that I just started off, actually, in architecture in what I would say is a world-class practice, but a very conventional practice. We were located in Memphis, Tennessee. Then, in 2005, after Katrina in New Orleans, we relocated to the city. Roughly speaking, it was more like 2008, for me, to move down here.   Jonathan Tate: Through that process, and then, additionally, with the recession, and then, additionally, I was teaching at the time, it just ... I don't know. That's sort of the origins of how our practice became our practice is what I'd say. At least those are some of the pieces that all added up to our multifaceted focus as an office.   Jonathan Tate: The lineage being exposure to New Orleans, in a recovery standpoint; trying to assist in that recovery, but also in academia, where research, and engagement in topics that were sort of extra-architecture, in a way, all led to the establishment of our practice, today, which tries to focus both on architecture - making buildings - but also, all the other things surrounding what it takes to put together a building, or a city, or [inaudible]. That's kind of where we came from.   Eve Picker: What prompted you to move to New Orleans? I know we had Katrina, but why move your office there? What were you hoping that would accomplish?   Jonathan Tate: Well, the thing is, we were ... Memphis is close, but really far away at the same time. We were in a state with a practice, where we were busy ... Again, it's '05, and it's rolled into '06-'07; we were busy, but not that busy, and we were trying to re-calibrate, and stand up a little bit, just to drive in ... Anyway, focus on things that we cared more about, and less about just staying busy.   Jonathan Tate: Then comes Katrina, and we just wanted to help. There's a kinship with the city. We were both along the river. We spent- A lot of us in the office had sort of grown up coming down here. We really got wrapped up in what was happening, and wanted to help, basically.   Jonathan Tate: We were invited by a number of different people to speculate on what we thought the future of the city was. Again, we were doing this from afar, and an opportunity arose for my partner at the time to be able to move down to New Orleans, and do a sort of visiting-teaching position at the university here, Tulane.   Jonathan Tate: That was kind of our segue to making a decision just to move everything down. We, through this process, recognized that there was only so much we could do in this environment. being, again, away in another city. I haven't had a chance to kind of be on the ground, and see if we could really have an impact. That was important to us. We were able to act on that; then, eventually, we moved the ... He came down, and eventually, we decided to move the entire office down.   Eve Picker: Has it played out that way? Do you think the work that you're doing intersects with impact, and socially responsible work in New Orleans? How do you think you're, in your little practice, helping the city?   Jonathan Tate: Well, yeah, actually I do believe that it does, but in different ways is what I'd say. I wouldn't say it's more nuanced; it's just that we don't ... It's not always ... Frankly, it's over 10 years, now; the city's kind of passed the recovery mode. Forgive me for saying, but there's still things that need to be resolved that were consequences of the storm.   Jonathan Tate: What I would say, more importantly, and back to the original question, is there's an ethos about how you engage in urbanization in the city, and how an architect can participate in that discussion, and contribute. That ethos is what's really in the office, whether what we're doing specifically relates to recovery, or whatever.   Jonathan Tate: It's, I'd say, more the spirit of that, and being here at that time, shortly after the storm, and just seeing the energy in the architectural, and planning community, and how there was a lot of ideas, and vitality, and just a real commitment to try to make this place survive, and be greater than it was.   Jonathan Tate: That spirit ... Again, sorry for using these terms, but I'd say that spirit sort of has infused the office in a lot of ways, and it's still - as a lot of people in New Orleans connect, and resonate on that level - but we're- it's definitely a part of, and been embodied in our office, for sure.   Eve Picker: Be sure to go to EvePicker.com, and sign up for my free educational newsletter about impact real-estate investing. You'll be among the first to hear about new projects you can invest in. That's EvePicker.com. Thanks so much.   Eve Picker: Do you want to just tell us quickly about a couple of projects that you think kind of embody impactful real-estate projects that you're working on? I know about them, but our listeners don't, so I'm hoping you'll explain a couple of things you're working on.   Jonathan Tate: Sure, sure. There's actually two- a couple of projects, and I should say, as an office, we had plenty of, like, "Here, we just do work for people," and I love all the work that we do for people, and I love all our clients. It's fantastic.   Jonathan Tate: Running parallel to that, we have projects that are self-starters, let's say; projects that we initiated, either through partnerships with people, or on our own. Those are the ones that I generally talk about, when we're having this kind of conversation. I'll sort of start it there.   Jonathan Tate: The one would certainly be our housing program, which we've dubbed the Starter Home*, with an asterisk, which is a infill ... You  mentioned in your intro, it's an infill-housing-development agenda, if you will; a strategy, a Project sort of with a capital P.   Jonathan Tate: What we've done was formulate a position about a need for a particular type of housing in New Orleans, and this is topical, by the way. I think, as we framed it, it's applicable in any city in the US, or at least from an American context, I think it's applicable anywhere.   Jonathan Tate: In effect, we were looking for housing opportunities that were leveraging what we saw as unrealized property, or land in urban, or strictly city environments; then trying to locate, and design housing on these sites that were focused on either first-time home buyers, or last-time home buyers, or anywhere really in between.   Jonathan Tate: The idea about the housing was is that it's sort of right-sized. It's resisting the sort of bloat that we're seeing in the housing industry, in general, and, as a consequence, was driving down some of the costs of the housing. It's by no means affordable, but it's certainly mid-market housing.   Jonathan Tate: In that, we're trying to interject design, and offer to the speculative buyer what we think is all the contemporary work, versus most speculative housing you're going to see; A tend, or a trend towards traditionalist, at least in single-family housing.   Jonathan Tate: That one- that project, again, the Starter Home* project is something we're really proud of, and that we worked on for the last year ... It's gone on five years now, basically, and we've managed to build  ... I think collectively we're at our 16th home. The last ones were ones that we ran through Small Change. It was the first project that we worked with you on there.   Jonathan Tate: Along the way, we've done a number of different houses. One that I'm starting to kind of look back on, and think of, more deeply, anyways, is a project that we categorized under Starter Home*, but it was something that we did for an individual, who was formerly homeless. He had purchased himself a small lot; basically one of these little remnant parcels that ... I think, in total, it was about 800 square feet of land. I forget the exact number, but it's small.   Jonathan Tate: We, with his help, designed a home for him. It's basically a micro house. It was, at the time, the smallest; I think it still is the smallest permitted home in the city of New Orleans. It was under 200 square feet.   Jonathan Tate: We did it in a way that he could self-build it. We sort of helped him with the construction; we created a set of documents that were permittable, but also something that he could actually go out, and build by it. We helped him in that process, and with pulling that together.   Jonathan Tate: Now, weirdly enough, we don't promote it a lot, but it's one that has a lot of meaning for us, and it's getting a little bit of traction here in the city, just with people that are interested in looking at other housing; other ways to provide housing for people that aren't just building homes; it may be  looking at a micro home, and looking at, again, these small parcels. That one's really interesting. Again, it's under that framework of the starter housing. I can keep going. There's another project that we're- or I can stop there.   Eve Picker: No, no, no, go ahead. One more project.   Jonathan Tate: Yeah. The other one I'd say is another project that has been hosted on the Small Change site, and another self-initiated project. It's actually, at least in theory, again, that we've come up with an idea, and then formulated a building around the idea.   Jonathan Tate: The idea being a cooperatively owned B&B that ... Basically a hotel, or a small hotel, in this case, where the operations are provided by the co-operative. The co-operative is made up of artists, and other creative individuals that need time to do their work, but don't often have that time, because they're too busy making money at a job, basically..   Jonathan Tate: The thought being is that we would create a co-operative. The co-operative would do the operations for the hotel, and then,  in return for your work at the hotel, you actually get room and board.   Jonathan Tate: Then, depending on how much you decided to work in the hotel, the theory goes that you work one day a week - you may work a little bit more; you may work less - but the rest of that time, because you're not worried about where you have to live, or where you're going to get your next meal, you're able to focus on, and concentrate on your work.   Jonathan Tate: That one's underway now, the one here, but we've already done one in Clarksdale, Mississippi. That one's up, and operational, and it's sort of our model that we're translating down here. Those are two projects that I think that-   Eve Picker: Obviously, you think socially responsible real estate is necessary. Do you see any current trends that interest you the most, that might propel that type of real estate further [cross talk] Maybe another question I want to ask you, also, or maybe this one comes first is, in your practice, now, which do you prefer? Do you prefer doing these self-starter projects, or working for your client?   Jonathan Tate: That's a good question. I'd rather answer that one, rather than the trend. I'm terrible at trends [cross talk] all I get asked is ... I'm no good at predicting that, I should say. In terms of  working with things, the truth is that I go back and forth. It depends on what day of the week, or what process, or phase that it's in.   Jonathan Tate: I think what I enjoy most is that they both exist simultaneously, because it's ... Again, it can be a headache sometimes. I really do enjoy working with clients, and other people, and helping them with their vision, and I also really enjoy, and appreciate the opportunity to kind of make some pivotal, and essential decisions around the things that we do. It's not that I would say I prefer one or the other. What I prefer is that they both exist.   Eve Picker: Right. Okay, I'm going to retract the trend question, and I'm going to ask you if there's any anything in the world of real estate that you'll particularly interested in that's new that you're following? Let's not call it a trend.   Jonathan Tate: What we are moving in to, and what we're trying to think about more ... There's nothing new about this, in some ways; it's just I'm not sure that people have been critical about it, in certain ways. It's all this mid-rise housing, and the typology around multifamily housing ...   Jonathan Tate: It's what we would sort of colloquially call a four-over-two, or a three-over-one, or whatever, but where you have a base that's not constructed non-combustible, which means it could be retail; it could be parking; it could be whatever. On top of that, you've got the obligatory three-four floors of housing that sit on top of it, which is the kind of building block of what we're seeing here in cities, now, and have, historically.   Jonathan Tate: It is also, in our mind, leading to the homogenization of urban environments, because it's become formulaic. It's what we're really digging into now, and again, this isn't a trend; this isn't necessarily anything new. It's just we're starting to question what that is, and how we can engage in that conversation, and maybe turn it a little bit, and see if there's a way to make a richer- or get a richer project out of it.   Eve Picker: I think the other question I had is do you think there are some trends, and I know you don't like that word, in real-estate development that are really important for the future of our cities?   Jonathan Tate: In my world ... It's funny; this is a question, again, it's hard for me to really answer in some ways, because, believe it or not, and I often say this, I don't see myself as a developer, at least not by definition.   Jonathan Tate: What I mean by that is we're not really set up as a development practice, per se. We do development, but we're not organized around development as a business model. Consequently, weirdly enough, I don't really follow development as much. I don't pay attention to it probably the way that I should but ...   Jonathan Tate: That's not to say we don't interact with it in interesting ways. Obviously, we've got clients that are developers, aside from ourselves ... There's things that are floating around now that ... Actually, honestly, a lot of people come to us to talk about, or a fair amount of people come to us with interest in, and want to discuss crowdfunding, the world that you're in. It certainly has a lot of interest, and I think people are trying to figure out how to utilize that as a tool.   Jonathan Tate: Lately, Opportunity Zone seems to be the thing that everyone wants to hear about. Those are financial trends, and what people are starting to focus on. I think your earlier question about any sort of social-minded real-estate development ... In our world, we don't see- you see a little bit of it, but you don't see a lot of it, and it certainly doesn't feel like a trend, unfortunately [cross talk]   Eve Picker: If you think about it, crowdfunding is fast - raising equity through a crowd, but co-working has had a meteoric rise, where people share office space, and share amenities, because it's flexible, and it allows them to move around; it allows them not to put down a lot of money on a space they may not need. The same is going to happen with housing, right? We're seeing [cross talk] housing, and we're seeing all sorts of new versions of living, and working together that didn't exist maybe 10 years ago.   Jonathan Tate: Something we're starting to get ... On that same track, something that we've started to engage with a little bit, in a couple of different cities now, is the role of the food market as an incubator, and a jumping-off point for restaurant entrepreneurs. That's a whole 'nother model that seems to be proliferating wherever we go these days.   Jonathan Tate: That's right. I think, for me, what's interesting about that is that it allows places that don't have much activity, or that someone may not go to, to open an office, because it's a neighborhood that they're not sure about, but it allows that neighborhood to kind of gather people who are doing things. That may begin invigoration of that neighborhood.   Eve Picker: If a nonprofit opens a co-working space, they're able to offer space to small businesses in the neighborhood, and they really have nowhere else to go, now, all of a sudden, you have some sort of expression of what's actually happening in the neighborhood. That's really interesting, I think [cross talk]   Jonathan Tate: Yeah, I totally agree, and we're certainly seeing that. I guess what I like about it, in addition to what you've described already, is the forefront of revitalization of a portion of a city, or at least that's one component of it.   Jonathan Tate: It also involves, often, non-developer types that are working towards these goals. I think by the time these kind of ideas make their way up, and they become, again, formulaic in some ways, that's when developers feel like it's safe to take it on, and implement different-.   Eve Picker: That's right, and that's why bankers feel it's safe to take it on..   Jonathan Tate: That's right.   Eve Picker: We're sort of stuck in this circle of traditional financial institutions not wanting to fund the things that will eventually make the places we live better. Someone has to kick that off, right? That's you, with your odd lots, or me, with my crowdfunding.   Eve Picker: There have to be those early starters, which I think brings me to my next question - how can we improve on that? It is so hard, as you know, to do those little startup projects, and they really don't provide much financial return. Clearly, we like doing them because they provide us some other sort of satisfaction. How can we get better at incubating those sorts of ideas for cities?   Jonathan Tate: I think, one, you have to lead by example, in a lot of ways, and that's certainly what we were trying to do. We had no ... With the housing in particular, there's no expectation that we were going to build thousands of units of housing, which we certainly need, like most cities [inaudible] help with a lot of issues, just availability, but also affordability. There's that.   Jonathan Tate: I think providing some evidence that this is a thing that one can do ... Then you see the adaptation of that, and the adoption of that, and how it can sort of roll through ... When I fortunately find myself in these kind of conversations, a lot, are people that are interested in it, that just need some encouragement, and some support.   Jonathan Tate: That said, as a way to make sure this continues to happen, or at least facilitate this happening, I think creating networks, collaborative networks, where people can call on one another for expertise, or just general encouragement, as we're saying, I think that's an important thing. That's the community, right?   Eve Picker: Right.   Jonathan Tate: That's what it takes for this to happen.   Eve Picker: Yeah. I wish every city had a Department of Big Ideas, and a little bit of money set aside for the projects, which they maybe turn their noses up at, because they're small, and they don't think they're important enough; those little projects can sometimes have an enormous impact in an unintended way.   Jonathan Tate: Yeah.   Eve Picker: One of the stories I like about you, Jonathan, is you've created this whole thesis around odd-shaped, forgotten, and abandoned lots in New Orleans. Recently, didn't New York City run a little competition on odd-shaped lots [cross talk] took from you. How did that competition end up, and why did they do that?   Jonathan Tate: Well, definitely don't want to take credit for the idea there, but they ... Actually, I followed it. We did not compete in it. We didn't submit anything for it, but have certainly followed it. I think it ended up they selected some winners, and we'll see if they're interested, and want to actually construct the housing that's on there, or that they've proposed, let's say.   Jonathan Tate: Weirdly enough, I was having a conversation with a New York region developer early on ... When I say early on in our process of building this housing ... They said to me, "That's really fascinating, but it only works where you are, or in similar-sized cities. It doesn't make any sense in New York, at all." Then, three years later, the city is saying, "No, this is exactly what we should be doing with these lots." [cross talk]   Eve Picker: -another really great example of that is the Ciclovía that's in Bogota, Colombia. I talked to the Mayor Peñalosa, who started that. He said they had no operational funds, and it was really a question of whether they created the Ciclovía, which is an open street once a week for the residents of the city, who are very poor, and the city had many problems, or whether they paved the roads.   Eve Picker: They chose to do this open street for the people, instead. The last time I looked, I think it was 100-miles long. Every Sunday, they close the streets, and people go out there, and run, and bicycle, and do lots of other learn things. That idea has spread to practically every city in the world.   Jonathan Tate: Yeah.   Eve Picker: It's had an astounding impact , just that idea, so, those little ideas [cross talk]   Jonathan Tate: I think you're right. Look at something  the High Line in New York, as well. I feel like every city is clamoring for their own version of that, now, too, because they just see how impactful, and how it's making use of an abandoned resource, right?   Eve Picker: Right, so maybe ... Go ahead.   Jonathan Tate: I was going to say, that's part of this ethos, as well, when we when we talk about the development, or redevelopment of cities. It's like looking at things not as, I don't know, refuse, or eyesore, or junk, or waste, or whatever you want to call it.   Jonathan Tate: It's just like there are opportunities all around us, and just understanding how to capitalize on those spaces, on those buildings, on those structures, it really takes imagination. That's really, I think, what we should be supporting, and trying to cultivate. Back to your idea of the Department of Big Ideas, I think that's a great idea.   Eve Picker: In other words, use every corner of the city, and don't waste it, because we've built the infrastructure, and we paid for it, and there are people there. Anyway ...   Jonathan Tate: Yeah, yeah.   Eve Picker: Well, I have to ask you, you've crowdfunded a couple of projects on our site, and I'm wondering what role you think that equity crowdfunding can play in building communities, or building better communities?   Jonathan Tate: Yeah, it is ... Well, I'm going to have to say I'm absolutely enamored with it, as a process, and as a platform, and as a tool to help with development. The thing that I think it can do more of, and frankly, I haven't done a great job with our own raises is how it might galvanize neighborhoods around development.   Jonathan Tate: I think that's the one of the principal aspirations of this is that you can- that everyone should be able to participate, and be involved with the redevelopment of their own neighborhoods, or their own community, or their own city. They should be able to support that in some way.   Jonathan Tate: Again, here's a tool for us to use that would enable people to support, and basically cast a vote for what they felt like were strong investments in their city, and that they see a benefit of that.   Jonathan Tate: That's where, actually, if, or as the next raise comes, that's the thing that would be ... At least for us, on the crowdfunding raise, it'd be the thing that I'd want to try to focus on more of is just how do we pull people into it that are directly impacted by it?   Jonathan Tate: That's where, again, that's what I would see as one of the great advantages of this; just leveraging it, and making people aware of it. Then sort of pulling them into the process. I think that's an important tool.   Eve Picker: Yeah, so, I think other than raising money, as you said, it can galvanize a neighborhood, and it could provide- even could provide proof to a zoning department that a project could go ... I think there are maybe other things that we haven't thought out about that it could help with kind of the crowd [inaudible], right?   Jonathan Tate: Yeah, and there again, it becomes emblematic, and you see it is  here's a test case, and it proves that it's right. It doesn't have to be grandiose. You don't need to raise $10 million. I think if it was a small project that a lot of people were able to participate in, then that's ... They have an ownership in that, [inaudible] people around it have ownership, and that's great.   Eve Picker: Right. I suppose I have one wrap-up question; it's a big one. That is how do you think real-estate development, or architecture, or thinking about cities could be improved in the US?   Jonathan Tate: Whoa, that's a big one. Let me think ... Let me think about that. Going back to the comment that I made about mid-sized housing, if you asked me that question today, I'm, again, increasingly interested, but also frustrated with the built environments that we're seeing kind of rapidly expanding in most cities that reflect a lack of imagination, or better yet, the propensity for developers to sort of follow known models.   Jonathan Tate: In this case, it's like we understand a certain kind of housing type, or you just kind of build that, because it's known, and it's comfortable, and we can rely on it. I don't particularly care for the consequences of that in our cities. As things are popping up, it's just- we're losing characteristics, and qualities of our urban environments that I think make going to Pittsburgh different than coming to New Orleans, right?   Eve Picker: Right.   Jonathan Tate: I'd say that's the piece. If we can start challenging the development community to think about things a little bit differently, or to try to localize a little bit more ... I understand the economics around all of this, and why it is what it is, but it's just revealing what's happening now, just acknowledge it, so that, as we move forward, we could challenge some of those preconditions a little bit, and come up with work that feels like it was born out of the location that it belonged, right?   Eve Picker: Yes, yes, absolutely. Maybe the most important thing you said is lead by example, because if you do some terrific projects, others will follow, as we saw you do ... You tackled odd-shaped lots, and New York City followed.  Perhaps, the timeline's too long? I think having creative people working on cities, like you, is absolutely essential, and I want to thank you for that.   Jonathan Tate: Well, thank you.   Eve Picker: With that, let's wrap up. I thank you very much for joining us, and I'm sure we're going to talk again.   Jonathan Tate: Yeah, great. Thank you.   Eve Picker: That was the amazing Jonathan Tate. Today, Jonathan gave me three great takeaways. First, to always lead by example. Second, that I'd forgotten things can have great value, and third, that it's worth looking beyond formulaic answers to solve tricky urban issues. What did you learn?   Eve Picker: You can read more about Jonathan on the show notes page for this podcast, at EvePicker.com. While you're there, please consider signing up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate, while making some change.   Eve Picker: Thanks so much for spending your time with Jonathan, and I, today. We'll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.  

You ve probably heard of Maslow s Hierarchy of Needs. At the foundation of the pyramid is our need for shelter and food. Even if you re a real New Orleanian and you think about food a lot, there s a pretty good chance you don t spend too much time pondering the 40 trillion bacteria living in your gut. Dr. Dale Pfost does. Dale s company, Microbiome Therapeutics, has launched a product called BiomeBliss. It s a step up from probiotics. BiomeBliss is prebiotics. On the basic need for shelter, Jonathan Tate and his company, OJT, are an architecture and design company who are taking a novel approach to where you live. They re buying up irregular size lots that nobody wants in desirable New Orleans neighborhoods, and building irregular shaped homes with irregular low price tags. Peter Ricchiuti goes Out to Lunch at Commander s Palace with Dale, Jonathan, and a whole new look at our most fundamental human needs. If you re a regular follower of Out to Lunch and familair with New Orleans, this is another in the series of conversations of which there seem to be an increasing number colored with a certain incredulity that such original thinking and world leading scientific break throughs are happening here. Photos over lunch by Jill Lafleur. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is the importance of call tracking and monitoring for both advertising spend as well as training? Aryeh and Brett speak with Jonathan Tate, the Product manager of Avanser about their service that allows for intelligent, real-time call tracking and monitoring which helps you stay on top of your advertising spend and reduce wasted media as well as training and customer service ! For more information about the show and guest visit http://eaglewavesradio.com.au/episode/view/techknowledgy-somebody-pick-up-the-phone

Liz Williams had a hand in creating the World War II Museum and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Finding herself at the same age Julia Child was when she left the straight life behind and started out following her passion for food, Liz did the same and founded the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Liz had no idea she was about to become an American pioneer the first person in the nation to found a museum dedicated to the culture of food and drink. One of the benefits of knowing the history of food is setting fools straight about things like baby Jesus in your king cake. If you haven t got time to listen to this whole show, skip forward to minute 32 and check out how Jesus came to not be in your king cake. Guests on Midnight Menu 1 bring a guest, a 1. Sometimes these folks are food people, sometimes not. Liz s 1 is an architect. Not just any architect, Jonathan Tate designed and is overseeing the development of the new Southern Food and Beverage Museum on Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. We recorded this episode of Midnight Menu 1 in the currently closed Grille by The Hill restaurant next to Monkey Hill bar on Magazine Street. Somewhere between a ghost tour and an Edward Hopper moment.

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Drs. Murphy and Sklar, a psychiatrist and a physiatrist, (I'm psyche and he's soma) join producer, Jonathan Tate, in bringing you the best of healing wisdom from resolving back pain to depression, addiction to affliction. Compare this owner's manual to what's out there...

Dr. Murphy is incited to rant by a few well-placed questions by Jonathan Tate. Ranting is more passionate and interesting than the more controlled, reasonable conversations that the show had become.

Dr. Murphy is incited to rant by a few well-placed questions by Jonathan Tate. Ranting is more passionate and interesting than the more controlled, reasonable conversations that the show had become.

Welcome to the second episode of Bigfoot Society Open Phone Lines.A live call in show on Youtube where I talk to people and hear their story live about the weird and unexplained.Call-in guests on tonight show:A Milwaukee update with Ben from the Hodag Store - https://www.thehodagstore.com/A chat with Jonathan from Eastern TN all about folklore and cryptid stories from his relatives, Bigfoot type creatures, banshees and more.A call from Tate Hieronymus about his documentary series "A Search for Sabe" - https://www.youtube.com/user/tatehieronymusAn extended catch up chat with Mike Casey all about the current state of affairs with his Bigfooting in Washington State. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBShrjd6_ErEpKq0l1c0tXwMake sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon so you won't miss any upcoming Open Phone Line episodes in the future.Do you have a story to share or know someone who should call in?Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sunday nights at 9 pm CST.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Qq45W6iaTU8FE9kelxT7QWe'll see you at the next Open Phone Lines on Youtube!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy